Spaghetti Glass

More experiments with float glass products. This time I have been messing about with a tub of mixed glass "tangles".



After some disappointing results with bubble powder I have had success with the tangles. They are in assorted colors and are different thicknesses of hollowed glass, similar to stringers. These tangles are all 82 coe, making them compatible with float (picture) glass.



Noodles is a fused glass dish, now for sale on Etsy. I would, ideally, like a wider color range but I am quite pleased with the outcome.

You win some, You lose some...

In a previous post, Float Glass Products, I raved about the exciting new stuff I had bought that is COE82, making it compatible with float. Whilst the colors of float glass are disappointing (compared to the vibrancy of Bullseye glass) I had high hopes that these products would help me to make new, innovative glass designs at a fraction of the cost of COE90 glass. Here's what has happened so far...



Clear bubble powder: I was hoping for large, blistering bubbles such as the ones I get in my sushi dishes but the bubbles came out more like a rash. Unperturbed, I made another tile with lots more bubble powder (see below). If you look carefully you wlil see that the larger bubbles have stress fractures in them.



Below: clear bubble powder experiments with other bubble powders.
Curious! The one of the left is clear and turquoise bubble powder. The clear powder appears to have stripped the turquoise of any color, leaving it a dirty gray. The one on the right is clear bubble powder mixed with red bubble powder. It has also stripped the red color from the bubbles. I'm blaming the clear powder but, as I am still experimenting with this, I could be wrong.



Below: bubble powder stud earrings with clear and pink bubble powder. You can see a faint sheen of pink around the bubbles. They do look unusual in the fact that the bubbles look as if the glass is under water but, as I am an "in-yer-face" with color kind of gal, I will be working on this to make it more colorful.



Transparent frit: because colored float is slightly disappointing I was expecting the frit to be a bit wishy washy. Instead, I am quite pleased with the results.
From left to right: First one is frit mixed with clear bubble powder. again, it's turned a horrible grayish color, like burnt ash.
Second one is amber, orange and red frit between two pieces of float glass. It looks quite good close up because it has tiny air bubbles trapped inside.
Third and fourth ones are both frit placed between and on top of the glass. The image doesn't show it clearly but these pieces have a lot more depth and color to them.



Below: amber, orange and red frit earrings. The transparency makes them look almost liquid. I'm quite pleased with these and they are available for sale in my Dawanda shop.



Silver and gold glass sheet: this glass has a coating of gold or silver and it has lots of pre-made scratches that make a pattern on the glass. (It would be good to be able to buy it as a solid metallic color too). Here's what I did with it.



Below: various glass nuggets fused with gold and silver coated glass. The ones on the left have been fused with a cap of clear glass. The gold and silver coating has burned out and the glass cap has devitrified. Not good! The ones on the right have been fused with the gold ands silver coated glass on top of the clear glass. Although it looks much better I didn't get the shrinkage in the kiln that I was expecting so I have since cut the glass shapes to a smaller size.



Hearts of Glass. These glass hearts have been hand cut and fused by me, Glassprimitif. They are made from float glass (coe82) with a coating of gold or silver glass. Each one measures 1.5" (3cm) and are available for sale at Glassprimitif on Etsy.

Float Glass Products

At last! My glass order is finally here. All these goodies are co-efficient with float glass (coe 82-84) and I am already experimenting with them.



Shown here: two sheets of "precious metal" glass in gold and silver, five jars of fine glass frit, three jars of glass bubble powder and a bucket of glass "tangles". The tangles looks fabulous and I hope to make some dishes based on sweet shop candy with them. They are like hollow twisted glass stringers, but a bit thicker than the normal stringer.
Not shown - two pens of "liquid" stringer in black and white and two nibs.



Below are some examples of float glass fusing products including a slumped dish made with different colored frits. I could have bought float glass millefiori too but the colors are rather disappointing. I think I'll wait until the technology for float glass can create colors that equal Bullseye or murano.



Anyway, I will be posting all my experiments (good and bad) here on my blog so please stay tuned!

Creative Glass Guild January Challenge

The CGGE Challenge for January is for members to create glass art by recycling. The CGGE members have produced some fabulous glass items such as beads from wine bottles, fused roundels in stained glass, pot melts from scrap glass and fused glass "mistakes" smashed and then re-fused. Here is my contribution - although it is more of an example of "how not to"!
1. The first image shows a collection of old and battered picture frames that have float (picture) glass. All this glass is fusible but, as the source is unknown, I don't combine it with other float glass. Sometimes picture frames come with really poor quality glass and so I match like with like.
2. The second image shows a selection of metal items that I used as inclusions in the glass. These included copper, rusty washers and dubious metal decorations.
3. This image shows two fused glass coasters with metal inclusions. They were fused at the same firing in the kiln and they look fairly good!
4. The copper star shape has fused well because copper fuses at high temperatures and, as the copper shape is quite thin, it fused with a relatively flat air pocket inside the glass.
5. But look carefully at the coaster fused with rusty washers. Because of the variety and thickness of the metals the glass coaster has a stress fracture running along the base, which formed as soon as the coaster was removed, cold, from the kiln.
6. The final image clearly shows the stress fracture along the bottom of the glass. It's still in my studio and I look at it every day - waiting for the coaster to go "ping" and fall into pieces.

What is pixie dust?

I understand that pixie dust is powdered mica in the USA but this looks like coarse powdered glass to me. It's a beautiful cobalt blue and fuses with float glass (coe 82). What do you think?

Creating a Glass Dish Part 2

When the glass components of the dish are dry I arrange them on a primed kiln shelf and glue some decorative fused glass blobs onto the hearts with Elmer's glue. I leave the glue to dry thoroughly before I place the kiln shelf in the kiln. I us a liquid primer that I make up myself and apply it with a haik brush. Haik brushes are quite hairy so I am careful to rub off any hairs that stick to the shelf. I give the shelf five layers of wash and dry each one with a hair dryer before applying the next. I used to spray the wash onto the shelf but this was too messy as the spray bottle kept clogging. Also, I like the texture the brush marks give to the base of the glass.

Now I switch the kiln on for the initial heating phase. I start at No. 2 on the kiln dial for the first hour and bring the glass up to it's strain release point by 150f every 30 minutes. When the heat reaches 1000f I put the bung in the kiln and take the kiln up to 1,500f at a faster rate. When the glass reaches its strain release point I look through the bung hole to check on the glass. The kiln holds this temperature for between 5 and 15 minutes (longer if its float glass) to soak the glass. By now the glass should look nicely rounded and glowing. I remove the bung and turn the dial back down to 2 (on my Aim kiln I reach 8 on the dial) until the temperature reaches 1000f. This is the rapid cooling phase and when the kiln reaches 1000f I replace the bung and leave it to soak at this temperature.This enables the glass to anneal so that becomes tempered and won't shatter when the kiln is cold. I like to leave the glass to soak for a minmum of one hour . Then I turn the kiln off and leave the glass to cool to room temperature.

Creating a Glass Dish Part 1

This is Bullseye glass and it's my favorite. The Bullseye factory is in Portland, Oregon www.bullseye.com which is why it is more expensive than in the US. Must be the air miles! But the colours are lovely, it is easy to cut and grind and doesn't lose its intensity when fused. I'm a big fan.


So these are the colours I am going to use in my glass dish. I have cut a square of 5" in thick clear glass, a slightly smaller square of thin vanilla opal and now I am going to cut the heart shapes in red, orange, amber and lime green thin transparent glass. I draw round the paper heart template with a permanent marker pen and cut the hearts with a Toyo cutter. I try to be as economical with the glass as possible, saving small fragments to use as frit and larger pieces for other projects.


Here is the glass dish prior to grinding. I have a small Glastar diamond grinder which I bought from Tempsford Glass about four years ago. It gets a lot of punishment but its still going strong. I like to use a fine grinding head for Bullseye and change to a coarse grinding head for float and very thick glass. Once the glass has been smoothed I wash it in hot soapy water, rinse it in vinegar and water then dry it very carefully.

Float confetti and bubble powder

About Float

"One day we'll float....take life as it comes" PJ Harvey

I first started out fusing with float glass. It's cheap, it's plentiful (ask for scraps at your local frame maker's) and it's easy to cut. Float is called "float" because it is poured onto a bed of molten tin within a furnace and then machine rolled. It is totally flat and is used for window panes and picture glass. It's disadvantages are: it takes longer to reach full fuse temperature than most other glass, it sometimes becomes cloudy or milky during fusing and it can send splinters out when grinding. If you want to avoid cloudy glass (devitrification) then spray it with A Spray before it goes in the kiln and wear those goggles when grinding! Tempsford Glass sell Spray A.
http://www.tempsfordstainedglass.co.uk/
At first I fused copper wire and copper sheet between two pieces of float but then I discovered coloured float confetti. Now coloured float is widely available (only in transparents at the moment) which makes it cheaper to create dishes and coasters than using Spectrum or Bullseye. The good news is that dichro coated float is also available, although it's not as nice as dichro coated Bullseye.