I spotted a tutorial online about creating glass with a 3mm thickness. 3mm? You crazy cat, remember the 6mm rule? In an earlier blog post I mentioned one of the first rules of glass fusing that you learn is that glass, when heated to a fusing temperature, wants to be 6mm thick. So how do you make something with 3mm thickness and still fully fuse?
Kiln shelf, with a layer of firing paper and then 3mm fibre paper from which I've cut out some shapes - hearts and egg shapes. Placing small pieces of glass, murrini, frit, canes etc into the fibre voids.
You need 'just enough' for the glass when melted to squish up and fill the void. Too much and it squishes out pushing the fibre paper or under/over, if it can find room. Too little and you end up with gaps.
I'm used to judging the amount of glass that will pull in or push out to end up as 6mm depth but not 3mm and this clearly will take time to get it right.
Once I was happy with the amount of glass in each void, I put another kiln washed shelf on the top (face down) and then piled up with kiln furniture to weigh it down. Waiting for just under 9 hours for the programme to finish and an extra few hours for the kiln to cool enough, I lifted the kiln furniture and kiln shelf off the glass layer.
As you can see from the photos above of some results, I didn't quite have enough glass. It's a learning curve eh?
But this little heart I was happy with. Just the right amount of glass.
I added a little bit of glass to each of the other pieces, the fibre paper had held it's shape to reuse again. Kiln shelf back on weighted down and fired again for another 9 hrs. Fingers crossed they're all good this time!
Final step for this project is coldworking before a fire polish. Grind the edges, handpad the top and bottom of each piece to ensure a perfectly smooth finish and then back into the kiln for a fire polish. For those pieces that I'm thinking will make the perfect window hanging or decorative piece - before the fire polish, I'll drill a hole through which I can put some coloured ribbon.
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