Pounding Glass

It wasn't how I intended it to go. I'd spent hours awake in bed on multiple nights figuring out how best to use a particular glass. There wasn't a lot of it, but it is exquisite in its blend of red and flashes of rainbow colors, transparent so light will go through and highlight every nuance. The two small pieces I had were not something I could duplicate from some other source, so I had to be careful. 

I finally found a plan. The larger piece was cut into 4 identical rectangles, the smaller one in two, both matching each other but smaller than the first set. The larger ones were to be corner pieces cut our from a white square, all sitting on clear glass and fused. The second process, slumping, would raise each corner up into the light so their colors would show. The two smaller pieces were to be set aside for another idea, somewhere, sometime. I held on to that plan for weeks, waiting for my skills to come up to the precision needs of the cutting required.

Turns out it wasn't my skills needing to improve, at least not that much. The cutting wheels needed new wheels. If you ran them with pressure over the glass and couldn't hear a thing, your glass wasn't getting scored and would just randomly break - the exact opposite of precision. Early this week our supply person replaced the glass cutters. Suddenly it was almost like cutting butter: score, apply the special tool, and snap! Straight line where you wanted your line to go. It was time for the special project

This morning I did my measuring of each smaller piece to fit the cutting plan and piecing together of my pattern. 7 Pieces of glass on top of my very last precut piece of clear in the right COE so they'd fuse. I did some light grinding on a tiny corner, scrubbed the cut pieces so all the markings (like COE so they wouldn't get confused with the wrong kind and shatter)  and fingerprints and even gummy residue from a piece of masking tape were gone. After fitting them on the base piece for a final check, a tiny bit more grinding was needed, scrub, rinse, repeat. 

Then I took them over to the board they'd stay on until tonight when their kiln was free for their fusing cycle. Do I blame the person who called out my name while I was in the process, urgently enough to  distract me from my task? Or just blame myself for not moving it in pieces and reassembling it on the board? Or both perhaps. At any rate, one of the precious corner pieces slid off and shattered on the floor.

Note that the club floor, despite all the arguing at the time the building was constructed, is a solid slab of concrete covered with a very thin coating of one of those semi-plastic multi-colored pour-on finishes, which, being back, tan and orange, is perfectly designed to hide absolutely every single thing that ever drops on to it. Maybe not a large piece of blue, perhaps. It also is as hard as the concrete which supports it. That small piece of glass  became - if I counted correctly - 17 tiny sharp shards of multicolored glass. Emphasis on sharp.

Now we do have a tiny dust pan in the glass room. It's about 4 1/2 " across with a rubber edge that manages to bend out of the way of whatever it is meant to scoop up. It does not have a matching whisk broom  or similar to help scoot said pieces into the tray. Luckily we have a large supply of old toothbrushes next to the sink for cleaning glass which do the job quite well, so long as one is sufficiently intelligent enough to realize that three complete passes over the floor is still going to leave several shards of glass on the floor. At least the stools which are too short to do anything comfortably while sitting on them are just the right height to keep one's butt or knees off the floor to get the clean up accomplished reasonably safely. 

And in this case, recovery. I had a use for all those bits. I wouldn't have thought of it otherwise, but since the glass was already in small pieces....

There is a very expensive product out there for decorating your glass called frit. It usually is very finely broken bits of glass, though it can come is various actual shapes. Colors are anything you want, including dichroic, meaning there is a side which is sparkly  - probably prismatic - and sparkles light all over. When one is (lucky?) enough to come up with a supply of broken glass with no other purpose, but which comes from a source with a known COE so you know where to use it, one is advised to save it. Safely, of course. Most of us already have enough holes from working with glass and don't need more, especially combined with whatever was on the floor and decided to hitchhike to somebody's wannabe work of art by way of a quick sip of blood. Listen, the stuff may be very fussy about how fast it expands/contracts in a kiln. It has absolutely no preferences as to blood type or various kinds of contagions therein.

Anyway, you have two sources of frit. A little jar of it can cost close to $100. Your broken glass shards were already paid for. They just need something better in the way of uniformity. In other words, you have to figure out how to smash it safely. Either source should, once sprinkled over the surface of pre-kiln glass, smoothly get absorbed over the surface of said glass sheet as it bakes. Dichroic frit is a whole different headache which I've already been coping with. But this was ordinary fusible glass, and already was to have been a part of this project.

I needed advice. No, the club doesn't have frit-making supplies, although they are out there. We rely on our members coming up with our own frit. Since my project is scheduled for baking tonight, I needed to come up with a substitute. All my broken pieces for travel home were wrapped up in multiple layers of paper toweling and then inside a zipper baggie. I was advised by our two premier glass workers in the club to get a pair of paper bags and a hammer. A really hard surface was implied.

Let me throw this at you. How would you feel if you went to the food shelf and came away with several empty folded paper bags? Fortunately for the person I took to the food shelf that day, they also did get a typical supply of food, including the nearly dead produce that needed to all be eaten within a few hours or tossed out. I'd suggest making compost but AZ isn't the best place for keeping enough moisture in it to work composting magic. At any rate, I wound up with the empty bags, and never got around to recycling them. They have been sitting tucked between the wall and the dog food all these months. They are very heavy duty bags, and I finally found a use for them.

With Rich's help I got the use of a 2 pound sledge, a comfortably reachable wooden table surface, and a flat low-lipped plastic container sans lid that the glass could sit in while being pounded. I started out with the glass bits in the paper bags but that was ridiculous. And since those two leftover original pieces had gotten mostly repurposed to replacing the one larger piece in the corner, I added the otherwise unbroken but now much much  smaller leftover bit into the smash-me pile. Instead of glass inside the bag, I emptied it, then folded it over into a size that nearly filled the flat bottom of the plastic container. The glass was piled under the bag, keeping nearly every piece from relocating from sledge strikes more than a couple inches from where it had been sitting. A few tiny pieces did pop out from the edges where the bag didn't quite cover, but they'd lost most of their intertia by then, and mostly stayed inside, landing on top of the bag instead of out on the floor or in my face. I had my glasses on anyway. About every eight or nine blows, I'd stop, examine the glass, scrape (carefully) the larger pieces back into a central pile, then feel through the bag  where the now covered pile lay before the next set of whacks. 

A two pound sledge is a damn heavy thing after half an hour!!!! 

Not all the pieces are as tiny as I'd wanted. Largest dimensions are about a quarter inch now. Lots are pepper grain size. It's all random, which is just fine with me. Tonight I'll head back to the club, remove the piece now fusing (in black, white/purple, and a diagonal band through it due to figuring out how to use a very irregular piece) from its kiln to finish cooling, spread the frit from its current home in a small jelly jar onto the white parts of glass and spread around randomly with yet another one of those helpful toothbrushes. (Gotta keep those fingers from getting blood on the project: it's the wrong shade of red!) It'll bake / fuse overnight, while today's fusing piece will get slumped tonight in a second kiln. Saturday morning the first slumped piece comes out, gets replaced by another fused piece to slump, and tomorrow night the last piece goes overnight into the slumping mold. Sunday I bring 3 new square bowls home. 

The stacks are growing. Decisions will get made as to which Steve and I'll keep, and which go out for presents. (Oops: did I spoil the surprise?) Well, since you haven't seen any yet, they'll still be a surprise, right? I'm looking forward to seeing how the one with the flattened marbles turned out. We'll all be surprised by that one. They are supposed to sink into the glass they sit on and leave a round piece of different color, flush with the rest of the top surface. And there's still more glass, more marbles, more ideas, and before I get sick of glass, I'm absolutely positive there'll be more homemade frit. Now that I know how. And why.