Here’s the finished piece, but you can see a slide-show of all the stages of the piece.

I think it turned out rather nice. I started to have a problem with a bubble forming during the tack-fuse, but I cut the soak a little short and managed to keep it from distorting things too much. It all cleaned up when I slumped the glass anyway. I used the portable glass shop again to make the octagons and the fiddling cuts for the border pieces. That thing is worth every penny.

The gold is very hard to see, but it is still there; it became almost transparent and not so much metalic as simply yellow. I think the gold could work, but I will need to go with a thicker (and more expensive) foil. The silver and aluminum simply oxidized (although you can still see a little bit of silver, if you look closely. The copper behaved as before: turning a transparent cyan.

I like the baubles, but the photograph does not do them justice. They need to be held in the hand and moved in the light to see them sparkle.

Well, live and learn, eh? I’ll try it again without the adhesive and see what happens.

The piece turned out pretty well. The edge is very clean and round, and the piece took on the shape of the form very well. The kiln wash I used on the form even imparted an interesting satin finish to the glass.

In case you are interested in seeing the stages of the slumping process, here are two pictures that might interest you. The one on the left is the bowl cooling down in the kiln and still on the form. The one on the right is a close-up shot after the bowl had cooled enough to remove from the kiln.

From start to finish, this project took about 13 hours: two hours to cut the glass, and about 11 hours to fuse and slump the glass.

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.

The results are a little more opaque than I had wanted, but they could work as a reflective objective. The process with both was pretty much the same as before. Personally, I like the second one (#4) the best. The frit and powder I used give it a fair amount of color and randomness. The first one is a little too regular, but hey I had the scrap glass just lying around.

Speaking of scrap glass, as an added bonus, I made a bauble. It is just some of my Bullseye white opal with a couple of bits of scrap dichroic glass on top of it. I think I’ll polish the edges a bit, glue a jewelry bail to the back, and see how much I can get for it from some sucker.

There isn’t too much to say about these. Both pieces are about 3 inches in diameter. The base is Bullseye’s Tekta. For the first objective, I bent some stringer in a candle flame and then tossed some various frit (bits of broken glass) on top. For the second objective, I used stringer, a little bit of frit, and some small shards of dichroic glass. Dichroic glass has a thin film coating on top that changes color depending upon the viewing angle.

Incidentally, while I like the first one best, the pictures really don’t do the second one any justice. Dichroic glass really needs to be moving for you to see it to full effect.

Two interesting things happened with this one. The glass I used is textured on one side, so I put the textured sides together. This trapped air between the glass, which accounts for the interesting bubble pattern embedded in the glass. The other interesting thing that happened was that the copper oxidized in the heat of the kiln, turning a light blue (and, oddly enough, transparent).

For what it’s worth, I doubt I’ll do more of this style of dish any time soon. I’ve done several now, and I need to try some other things. Time for some new molds.

Edit: I got a question about the firing schedule and so on. For reference, the glass I used was Bullseye’s Tekta. Here’s the firing schedule:

Here are some pictures of my kiln. The first is of the kiln itself the first time I fired some glass in it. The second is a picture of the glass as I was firing it. The second picture isn’t too good, I’m afraid, but I was lying on the floor trying to take a picture through a tiny peep hole (you can see the cover for it on the front of the kiln).

One of the fun things you can probably appreciate from these pictures is what it is like to “flash vent” the kiln. That’s when you have to rapidly cool the glass down enough so it won’t crystallize after it has been fused. You do it by opening the lid while the glass is still red-hot. You can see by the placement of the handle that I kind of need to wear fire resistant gloves and use a hook. It’s just a little warm in there.