Fused and Slumped Sampler Platters

The Sampler Platter fused glass class is officially over and it was incredibly successful! I'm so happy with the plates that my students put together!


This is a detail shot of one of the plates. You can see the blue tile in the middle that was made during the frit, powder and stringer session has been capped with clear glass and accented with a tea light flame worked star-shaped stringer. As always, the dichro bits just don't photograph as strikingly as they appear in person.

This plate makes me think outer space, galaxy, the next frontier...Cool, huh? Great job, Alycia!


My plate was not as successful...Don't get me wrong, it showcased every possible technique I could think of for a beginners' class, to a fault! Unfortunately, some incompatible glass found it's way into my scrap bin. What?!? How the heck did that get there?!?

So, how do you tell it's incompatible? Well, if you've been following me for long, then you know I've run into this problem before...and thankfully, it's only MY plate that's ever affected! So, as soon as this plate made it's way out of the kiln, I knew something was amiss...

If you look closely at this photo, you can see the hairline fractures at the edge of the two blue squares. See that? That's incompatibility. The crack follows those blue pieces too well to be anything else! And guess what else? When I scored my plate to free the pieces, the knocks with the hammer (gentle taps on the underside of the score) broke those pieces out almost perfectly! So, after removing the blue glass, I refilled the voids with some aventurine green scrap pieces to melt back down into one. It's currently in the kiln, and with any luck will be a slumped platter within 24 hours!

Here is the other platter from the class that is awaiting a slump firing. It is also currently in the kiln. My new-ish Paragon Pearl-22 and I are still getting to know each other. The first firing just didn't fire hot enough or long enough and I wasn't happy with the fact that you could feel the seam between pieces on the underside of the plate. With Pooja's permission, I also drilled a little hole in the middle to see if I could squeeze the biggest bubble out. We'll soon see how well that turned out!

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.