Dichroic Glass Workshop

Student work - dichroic coated Bullseye glass

I recently travelled over to York to teach a one day workshop on dichroic coated glass fusing. I loaded up my car and set off to spend a happy Sunday cutting glass in Helen Drye's kitchen. 
Helen is a silver clay jeweller who was looking to expand her designs by including fused dichroic cabochons placed into silver clay settings. Along with her friend Lynne, who is interested in making dichroic glass jewellery, we went through the processes of designing, cutting, grinding and fusing dichroic coated glass. 

Glass heart

Dichroic coated glass is fabulous to work with because, once fused, the most amazing colours come to life and the glass has a colour shift as it catches the light. This means that it gives a touch of luxury to the wearer, enhancing clothing with flashes of colour. As it is a coating of metal oxides onto a glass surface it is also quite expensive to buy. I buy all mine from Warm Glass as they stock CBS (Coatings by Sandberg) dichroic which has the best colours and patterns.

At the workshop both students made three pieces of glass jewellery each, the first using small pieces fused between black and clear Bullseye glass, the second using dichroic coated glass stringers and the third, a design of their own.  I hope the tuition they received has helped them to think about their own designs and come up with their own style. The possibilities are endless. 


I had a lovely day as Helen plied us with tea and lunch in her lovely garden and I hope they enjoyed it too. If you live in North or West Yorkshire and would like to join a glass fusing workshop please email me HERE for details. Follow Glassprimitif on Facebook to see more Students' Work. 

Glass Fusing Students

Funky Fish Workshop at South Square Centre

I REALLY enjoyed myself last Saturday teaching a workshop on Funky Fused Glass Fish at South Square Centre. I hope the students did too. Nine future glass artists joined the workshop to learn how to design and create their own fused glass fish in both float and Bullseye glass. The workshop covered the basics of cutting glass, grinding, working with both transparent and opal glass and making some delightful fused glass fish. The workshop also covered colour theory, glass types, how glass behaves in a kiln and fusing and annealing. In fact, a comprehensive introduction into the creative and tech side of  warm glass. Here are the results of the workshop - they did a good job!

Bullseye Glass Fish - students' work 

The next workshop at South Square will be Shards, Frits and Stringers on Saturday 4th August. This is an introduction into making glass tiles or coasters with additional glass pieces, powders and rods. At the end of the workshop I will take the students' glass home and fire it in my kiln before posting it back to them. 


I am now arranging the September workshop on Glass Fusing but I'm in a bit of a quandary regarding what to teach. I have a choice of three workshops so I am asking people to vote HERE. I will teach the workshop that gains the most votes. 
The choices are:
1. Dichroic Glass Jewellery using top quality CBS dichroic coated Bullseye glass to make pendants, earrings, brooches, cufflinks - whatever your fancy. Dichroic glass glitters and shimmers in the light and has an amazing colour shift. 
2. Fused Glass Dishes takes students through the process of designing, cutting and creating fused glass dishes in both float and Bullseye glass (examples HERE) that will then be slumped into moulds to form delightful dishes. 
3. Fused Glass Hangings and Light Catchers with copper wire, inclusions, frit and coloured glass. These look fabulous hung in front of a window (see below). 

Fused Glass Hangings

If you are interested in Glass Fusing Workshops at South Square Centre in Thornton, Bradford please email Glassprimitif or contact South Square HERE. 

Rip out my heart!

Each of these glass hearts has been made as Valentine gifts and they are available for sale at http://glassprimitif.etsy.com All shipping is free.

Bubblelicious

I love making sushi dishes with bubble powder as it creates totally unique dishes each time I use it.
What is bubble powder? It is a fine fusing powder that, when sprinkled between two pieces of glass, will form blisters of colour, pushing up bubbles onto the surface of the glass.



"Ocean Floor" fused glass sushi dishes by Glassprimitif



I sell bubble powder that is COE82. This means that it will fuse with picture (float) glass only. As picture glass is so cheap compared to other art glass, this makes bubble powder a great medium to experiment with. http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=8354683
Bubble powder comes in two grades: the finest powder is called Bubble Classic (shown above) and forms large blisters in between the glass in deep, liquid colours. Boreal Bubble is a coarser grain and forms small pock marks in the glass in bright colours. I like to mix the Classic with the Boreal to add texture to the glass too. Bubble powder comes in wonderful colours such as yellow, turquoise, cobalt, Boreal red, Boreal orange and ruby gold. By mixing colours together you can add a third colour to your glass. For example, mixing turquoise and yellow will give a rich green sheen to your glass, as seen below.



"Forest Floor" fused glass sushi dish by Glassprimitif

To use the powder: shake a small amount of powder over a piece of clean float glass and cap with another piece of float glass. Fuse to your usual fusing schedule. Where the powder is thicker, larger bubbles will form inside the glass. If you intend to slump the glass then choose a shallow mold or the bubbles will fracture if they slump too deeply.
Caution: when handling the powder, remember to use surgical gloves and to wear a mask. Wash hands immediately after use and wipe up any surplus powder.

"Pink Bubblegum" fused glass pendant using ruby gold Boreal bubble powder http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=8296137
Stained glass suppliers Delphi from the United States also sell bubble powder which is co-efficient with all types of glass but, as I have never used it, I can't vouch for it. http://www.delphiglass.com/

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

Glass is good

The first glass I began fusing was float scrap that I could get free from work. I would fuse washers, copper wire, copper sheet, leaves and razor blades between the float. I still have these samples in a box along with all the pieces that went wrong. (It's a big box). When I got more familiar with glass fusing I looked around for a coloured glass that met my requirements and settled on Bullseye. The colours are so rich and vibrant. Here's an example of a few pieces of my Bullseye glass stash. My favourite colours are red (of course), vanilla, lime green, orange, amber, black and turquoise. Bullseye isn't the cheapest glass and all ambers, oranges and reds are the most expensive because of the gold content. So I have been looking around for a more competitive supplier. I have to weigh up my fuel costs against postage costs and it is definitely more cost effective to order glass by post than to travel to the warehouse I usually go to. The most competitive UK Bullseye supplier has to be www.warm-glass.co.uk where I already buy my dichroic glass. The new site is easy to navigate and they stock such a huge range of Bullseye colours that I am reeling from the choice. I'm going to have to make a purchase soon as I want to make dishes in chocolate and blue opal glass. I can even save glass I like in my Wish List so that I can go away and think about it before I commit to buy. If anyone wants to buy me a present from Warm-glass I would like the book "Contemporary Warm Glass" by Brad Walker. Thanks!

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