Tiles and such…

I’m finally revisiting an idea I had when I first got into glass fusing. I had thought it would be really cool make little scenes or abstract patterns on 2 – 3 inch square tiles and then assemble them into a mosaic.  By using tiles I would not be restricted to the size of a monolithic piece of glass (typically 12 X 12 inches) or the size of my kiln.

My apologies for not having more pictures.  Once I get focused in on making something like this I space taking pictures off. Right now this piece is very much proof of concept.

This piece consists of 16 2 X 2 inch square tiles: 8 transparent and 8 opal white.

Here you seen them already foiled and soldered together in clumps.  I had imaged mounting these groupings on some kind of scaffolding and having them spaced out as you see here.  That idea didn’t work out to well. 

Anyway the groupings are re-enforced using a piece of 12 Ga copper wire soldered to the back.

I soldered the wire in a way that it would not bisect the transparent pieces.  Anyway I decided to solder all the groupings together in a more traditional mosaic format.  It turned out to be a bit of a challenge since I had already grouped some tiles together under the assumption that my original idea was going to work. Here’s one of the arrangements I came up with.

 

Well much weeping and gnashing of teeth (and one bottle of ruined patina…don’t ask me how) this is how it turned out.

Not too bad.  I won’t be submitting to the Spring art show. One of the tiles cracked during assembly.  I plan on making a bigger one with 32 tiles.  I promise I’ll be better at documenting this next time.  I might even shoot video of this process and put in on my YouTube channel.

TTFN

What’s up? This…

 

More Pot Melts…

…It’s what’s for dinner.

Wow…This has been hell

This is the schedule I said I was going to use the last time I posted about this piece.

Ramp	Target	Hold (in minutes)
FULL	960	100
50	800	30
75	700	30
100	100	0

Well…the cool down schedule wasn’t slow enough.  It ended up cracking again in a different location.

Sorry,,,don’t have any pics but it ended up splitting up into two pieces. The split ran vertically just to the right of the dichroic figure and to the left of the pot melt. I think it occurred because the glass was thinnest in the area that I had to fill in with frit and cooled unevenly.  I used an even more conservative cool down schedule and I think this time it did the trick.

Ramp	Target	Hold (in minutes)
FULL	960	100
50	800	30
50	700	30
50	100	0

Turtle or Turdlo?

Back when one of my daughters was a toddler she had a tendency to add “lo” to certain words.  Squirrel became Squirrlo, turtle became turdlo, squid became squidlo and so on.  I would gently correct her but soon she started doing it deliberately and get the biggest kick out of my feigned indignation: “It’s squirrel not squirrlo”. It was a fun little game.  Good memories.

So what does a turdlo have to do with the next piece I put together.  I guess I’m trying to suggest something about the mixed feelings I have over how it turned out. 

I had a pot melt that I accidentally broke into a couple of pieces and I decided to go ahead and break it up some more and re-fuse the pieces into pendants.  The problem was the pieces that I had fused seemed to be a bit oversized for pendants.  I started arranging them on a 10 X 10 glass plate and at first I though I could make them look like a very abstract school of fish swimming in the sea.  Well that wasn’t really coming together to well but as I arranged the pieces I began to see another pattern beginning to form.

Here is the “turtle” tack fused to the glass.

I decided to fill in the turtle’s body with medium opaque green frit and use transparent blue for the ocean.  I dug through my scrap glass bin and found some pieces that looked fairly organic and sea shell like.

Here’s how things came together in the kiln.

Here’s the result after a contour fuse (1400 Deg @ 10 minutes).

Wow.  Yeah I suppose it came out “OK” but I’m seeing two problems with this.

1. I had envision the turtle’s body having sharper boundaries and I’m not really sure why I thought using medium frit would provide that.  It looks kind of sloppy to me.  But then again this is an abstract piece so then…well…whatever.

2.  I should have used a lower fusing temperate. it should have been more ink the tack fuse range like 1350.  the “sea shell” pieces I added pretty much lost their surface texture and slumped too much.

So is it a Turtle or a Turdlo?

I see said the blind man…

I my last post I spent a fair amount of time licking my wounds do to a massive air bubble that formed under a piece I was firing.   I was fairly confident I could fix things by doing another tack fuse.

Well it worked…sort of.

The bubble fused flat and there’s a hole where a check of glass broke off.  Not a big deal since that will be filled in with frit.

The point where I got hammered was the cool down after the anneal soak. After the piece had been out of the kiln for about a day a crack formed along the boundary of the pot melt.

I spent a couple of days scratching my head of over this one before I realized what the problem was.  I used a cool down schedule which I though was appropriate for a piece that had an overall thickness of ~9 millimeters.  the problem was my piece was not uniformly 9 millimeters.  Here’s the cool down portion of my schedule.

Ramp	Target	Hold (in minutes)
FULL	960	80
75	800	0
150	700	0
200	100	0

I think this would have been OK if the piece was uniformly 9 mm thick but this was too aggressive relative to what I was trying to do. 3mm glass is going to cool much faster than 9 mm and that’s what introduced stress along the boundary of the pot melt.  If anything I need treat as though I were cooling down something that was 12 – 15 mm thick due to the varying glass thicknesses.  Here is the schedule I plan on using next time.

Ramp	Target	Hold (in minutes)
FULL	960	100
50	800	30
75	700	30
100	100	0

I’m thinking (knock on wood) this should do the trick.

I’ll keep ya posted.

You probably don’t want to forget this step…

Normally after I put kiln wash on a shelf I put it in the oven and let it bake 200 degrees for an hour and then bump it up to 500 for 15 minutes or so to get all the moisture out.  On this occasion I forgot to put a timer on and it ended up baking at 200 degrees for a couple of hours.  I figured this was enough, let the shelf cool down again and then used it a few hours later to tack fuse this project.

The failure to bake it at 500 degrees turned out to be a mega fail.


OUCH!
I figured I could fix it by drilling a hole in the bubble and then taking the piece to slumping temperature.  I flipped it upside down and filled the depression with water.  I cut the hole using a 1/8 inch carbide tipped glass bit and a Dremel moto tool.


Of course one hole wasn’t enough for me.  I was being a bit paranoid and tried drilling a second one because I was worried that the hole would seal up as the glass settled and I’d still be left with a bubble.  The first hold drilled clean. The second one not so much.

But this doesn’t necessarily bother me either since I had planned on putting a layer of colored frit on top and then doing a contour fuse.  I’ll just fill the hole in with frit. Unfortunately the small cracks pictured here weren’t content on staying “small” and grew to split the piece in half.  I’m still pretty confident that I can salvage it and fuse it back together.  The lesson here is you want to make darn sure you’ve got all the moisture removed from your shelf before firing something like this.
Dang! This smarts though…