Ahhh, glass. When I teach anybody else what I've learned, I always start with what I call "the Rules of Glass". First rule is is that glass does what glass wants to do. We can plan, and cut, add, subtract, give it different kiln settings, repeat with other settings, and try this and that, and in the process we can expect whatever we want. But it is the glass that decides what the final product is, and does it for reasons we are very lucky if we get to know what they were.
It might be how we combined things, like a wispy over black where the bottom layer of wispy gets absorbed into the black, so only the black and the top layer wind up showing. That happens to be a favorite effect of mine.
It might be that transparent glass tends to come up off the kiln paper cleanly, meaning you can reuse the paper, while opaque types tend to bring all the paper up with it until it disintegrates in a dust flurry no matter how careful you are to gently encourage it to sail dust free into the covered wastebasket instead of your lungs where it can do real damage. It's the reason most of us have been strongly encouraged to wear at least a surgical mask while anywhere in the glass room, and we close the door to the main part of the club while we're kicking up any paper dust. The exhaust fan in the room is supposed to suck it out, but it's never immediate and never complete.
The more I work with glass and have reasonable successes the more different things I want to try. It's more than different sizes, color combos, shapes, slumps. I've added tack fuses, stringers, precuts, decals, piecing smaller sections into a whole onto my skills list.
Oops, jargon alert! Let's start with slumps. One puts already fused glass over a mold with different heights and shapes instead of a flat base, and the glass, with the proper kiln setting, slumps down into the shape underneath it. (Unless it doesn't: see rule 1.) A tack fuse is a cooler kiln setting than a full fuse so the glass adheres to the piece it's touching and smooths a bit without totally melting into the other, retaining some 3D shape. Stringers are pieces of glass like long thin threads. They are straight (can be melted and curved but I'm not there yet), easily broken into shorter pieces, intended or not, and fused with either method to other glass to decorate it. They come in all sorts of single colors and are usually sold and kept in a cylindrical plastic tube. Generally since they roll, glue is used to keep them where intended. Decals can be added onto the glass, and come in all kinds of shapes, colors and themes. After carefully cutting close to the piece you want since they come several to a sheet, with several seconds in water they separate from their backing and get put on the glass to dry before a special kiln setting. Results vary. Precuts mean somebody else cut out a particularly complicated shape and you bought it to tack fuse in place, keeping that 3D effect. Or, you full fused it so it left a smooth top surface while preserving the color and shape... fairly well.
My Hail Mary project started out with an ordinary combination of square purple/white wispy on black. But I decided to use some precuts left from another couple projects, some small white 5-pointed glow-in-the-dark stars. Hey, fun, right? Full fuse too, because another project's tack fuse with the stars left one star with points pointing up, thus vulnerable. (I'll full full fuse that again later.) But I decided it needed more deorating, and I'd just bought a tube of stringers in many colors and needed to use them again. White, of course, to match the wispy and stars. Complicate the design, not the colors.
I glued the stars in place, one biggeer in the middle, 1 small in each corner. Then took 12 pieces of stringer to make a starburst around the central, larger star. That was when they started rolling around, just because they could or somebody breathed (guess who?) or there might be an undetected irregularity in the top surface from the rolling process that manufactured it, or they just bumped into the next when getting placed. They needed glue too. However, they still moved, taking their glue with them. I had a mess!
I had to pull them all off, wash all the glue off the plate, and start over. There was still enough glue on the stringers even after setting them on a paper towel that I didn't need to add more. Back they went. Problem fixed, right?
Wrong! There was still too much glue on them, and they were still moving around a bit when getting placed and placements were corrected. I took a wet paper towel and dabbed as much glue as I could off. Problem is when they they came out of that fuse, the glue I'd missed showed as dull patches along the stringers and even out between them.
Dammit!
I was just too stubborn to give up. I'd already put a lot of work into this and I wasn't ready to toss it. Time to take it home, and think.
Meanwhile Steve had been requesting that I start reorganizing my glass, huge quantities of which had been used by now, but still leaving a lot of pieces here and there, some ready for being pounded into frit, others of a size and shape to be put into future projects. But table space was too crowded. I put the kind I wasn't working with now back in the library, the 90 COE, separate from the other 96, well marked so they'd not get confused. I reduced my piles on the table to one large and one smaller box. (OK, there were a lot of other things on the table too, but let's limit this to working glass.) I remembered from that big sorting process several small pieces - pointy slivers actually, of clear glass. I suddenly had my Hail Mary plan. If this didn't work, nothing would rescue that project.
I took those shards to the club and using the tools there, cut them into small squarish pieces. Those got set on kiln paper, not touching each other, and in a full fuse kiln setting, turned into little hemispheres. Perfect! The next day those were cleaned of dust, sorted, and arranged on top of the length of each of the dozen starburst pieces, where the glue spread from the sides of the stringers. Remember those had been full fused so the surface was flat. The little pieces with their flat bottoms fit right on top. Of course they needed their own glue so they'd stay put until the tack fuse. This time I didn't drop glue on the pieces, but into a small little cup, then dipped a toothpick into the glue and "wrote" a line down each white stripe. I'd had to move each line of pieces off their mark, but did it in order so I knew just where they went back to, and did only one line at a time.
There was still one big smear of baked glue on one end, but it happened to be at 12 o'clock if we think of our twelve piece starburst that way. I made a large circle of them around that stringer end, both covering the glue and looking more planned in the design than not. It was repeated at the 6 for symmetry. (I was only that messy once, I'll have you know!) After an hour to dry, in the kiln it went, tack fuse of course, so the bubbles would help diffract the light from the room, fooling the eye just a bit, rather than flattening into the piece.
This morning I emptied the kiln and put a different piece in for a different purpose. My plan worked! If you look very very carefully, there is still a little tail of baked glue that wasn't covered in glass bubbles. So this one won't be for sale. But I do know somebody who would like it.
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