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.

A little bit of dichro

Two dishes with dichroic glass detail, fused on Bullseye glass.

Dichroic glass is lovely

I love dichroic glass. I first saw it on a US glass website and thought "that is the glass for me". I originally used Dichromagic but now I only use CBS (Coatings by Sandberg). When I first started making dichro jewellery there wasn't very much made in the UK and so the galleries I approached were quite taken with it. I went to the British Craft Trade Fair at Harrogate and most of the dichro I saw there was fairly awful (quite a lot of badly cut and underfused pieces) which encouraged me to invest more time and energy into making dichro fused pieces. Now, of course, the market is saturated with dichro and I am constantly changing my ideas and designs to keep it fresh. There is so much mass produced dichro on eBay that I can't get a good price so I'm quite glad there's Etsy now. I like to add small pieces of dichro on fused glass dishes to give them a sparkle but dichro is so expensive I have to use it sparingly. Like all my glass, I save every fragment when I have cut it and fuse the small pieces in the kiln to make decorative "blobs".
What is dichroic glass? Dichro isn't a glass in itself but layers of quartz crystal and metal oxides that coat a glass surface. As long as the coated glass is compatible with other glass then dichro coated glass can be fused with transparent or opaque glass. CBS dichro is coated onto Bullseye therefore CBS is compatible with all glass that is 90COE, including Bullseye. You can also buy other dichro coated glass, such as float, which will be compatible with glass that is 82COE. Both these types of dichroic coated glass are available from www.warm-glass.co.uk
Why use dichroic coated glass? The dichroic coating transmits a colour which, once heated, reflects a different colour from its surface. This reflection is dependent on the angle you hold the glass at because the refracted light from the surface makes it faceted. Dichro can also be influenced by the colours you are wearing as dichro jewellery can pick up different variance of colour. A good example of this is the blues which can range from cyan to violet. Wear it against black and it will be different than wearing it against, say, green. Wearing dichro jewellery is very attractive because the flash of changing colour catches the eye as the wearer moves around.














Dichroic glass jewellery by Glassprimitif is available from:
www.shawgalleries.com
www.glassprimitif.etsy.com
www.keighley.ac.uk/kaf

Carrick Bay

Last year we wnt to Scotland for our holidays and stayed at Carrick Bay on the Solway Coast. It was beautiful and so peaceful, with the mountains sweeping down to the sea and the little bays with birds and deer and rabbits. I took some photos of the beach and the skies and, on our return, made some sketches of the pebbles and rocks.



From these I designed four glass dishes in amber, brown and grey on vanilla with a touch of dichroic glass in each one.
These dishes have now been listed on Etsy and are for sale at $25 each. I have made two sets, although they will never look exactly the same, therefore they are unique. The second set are at Shaw Galleries in Skipton, UK.






I really enjoyed making them but I won't be making them again. I'm now interested in the seaweed photos that I took so I will be exploring this idea in glass.


www.glassprimitif.etsy.com
www.shawgalleries.co.uk

Hearts of glass

Before Valentine's Day Shaw Galleries asked me to make some heart shaped pendants. Yikes! I anticipated that the shapes would be very difficult to cut but, after a bit of practise, I really enjoy making these now. These ones are Bullseye chips placed between a clear and vanilla glass heart. Unfortunately, if I don't get them right the first time, they lose their shape in the kiln when re-fired (top left pendant) and become triangles. I also make these in dichroic glass. (See below). Hearts of Glass now showing at Shaw Galleries in Skipton North Yorks UK www.shawgalleries.co.uk and also at www.glassprimitif.etsy.com