It’s been a while since I could spend time in my glass shop, but I did get a new toy recently I had to try. My new toy is basically a jig to make it easy for me to cut regular polygons. To experiment with it, I decided to cut a whole mess of diamonds and to try to make a bowl using a tile pattern (like the checkerboard dish, only not so tedious to cut). Here’s the current state of the project.
The piece is made from six blue diamonds, six pinkish diamonds, and a whole mess of clear diamonds. Some of the clear diamonds are separators, but the rest I used to create a cap layer.
It came out pretty well. The edges are nice and smooth, and the diamonds kept their shape nicely. I also managed to introduce a nice bubble pattern into the glass by putting the textured sides of the glass pieces together. The only problem is that the pink glass really lost its tone when I fused it with the clear. Also, I could have cut bigger clear diamonds for the cap layer and saved myself some bother.
The next step is to slump it. I’m going to try a different technique. I bought some cheap steel bowls last weekend, and I’m going to try slumping the glass over one of them. I’ve not tried metal molds yet, so this should be interesting.
As an added bonus for reading this far, here is a picture of the piece assembled on the kiln shelf before fusing. You also get to see how messy my workshop is right now.
Hi, My name is Arline, I was looking at your website ,and was wondering how you went with the gold leaf.As I am a novice at glass slumping, I was hoping you might have been successful. I would be very grateful for any help you could give me. Yours sincerely Arline Brayshaw.Australia.
Unfortunately, I don’t have much to say at the moment on the inclusions… or glass in general. I haven’t been brave enough to try the gold leaf again, as I don’t know of a decent size to use to do the gilding that won’t burn. Also, I have had a string of misfortunes with my fusing. I’ve tried to make three things for my mother as a present, and each of those items has failed in one way or other (one actually shattered and destroyed my mold when the kiln turned off during annealing).
I need to regroup and figure out what I’m doing wrong. I’ll certainly post more when I have something that succeeds.