Thursday, February 25, 2010

Time to Tweak

I just finished my first "official" firing of my new Paragon Pearl 22 kiln.
It's been so long since I have fired a large kiln. I'm still missing a few things from the cross country move, and my log book with all the firing schedules is probably in the same box as the missing bracelet mandrel. (But, that's a whole different story.)
Here's the picture that I took this morning upon opening my kiln. I'm happy with how the designs turned out, but the firing schedule needs to be tweaked a bit. Each kiln fires a little differently.


The schedule that I used was tweaked a bit from the full fuse schedule at fusedglass.org (a great resource for glass artists, by the way).
After taking the pieces out of the kiln, there was still some texture; on the underside of one piece, and the top side of the other. At a full fuse, these two pieces should have fired fully and lost all texture. So, now I know for the next firing that I need to go to a higher temperature, and hold that temperature for a little longer.

Texture that shouldn't exist at a full fuse.

Back into the kiln the plates go, with some more designs that I've been working on. We'll see how the tweaked schedule works, and build on it as necessary.