Second Firing...

The second batch came out of the kiln and I am so excited! These came out better than I thought they would, and they're going up in Etsy tonight. :) Or tomorrow morning. I'm kinda tired.

Here's a comparison of what went in to what came out:

In addition, this is one
from the first firing:

There's a few I didn't keep track of and can't find. I'm going to see if there's a lost and found and hope nobody made off with them. The moral of the story is to initial everything with that neat little pain pen. :)

I'm having a blast seeing how things fire and how the colors turn in the kiln. A few prefires I posted in the last entry aren't up here because they turned into lifeless blobs, and I have decided I dislike the looks of the hard-fused pieces intensely. I don't like how they lose their shape. So...I'm going to stick mainly to soft-tack firings.

I have some new colors and textures of glass I bought today, as well as another sheet of silver foil, so I'm going to include those in the next batch. :)

I've taken a bit of a different approach to new pieces and am starting to incorporate lace and ribbon into a new set of chokers. I will be posting my results later in the week. I'm steering towards a lolita look, which I've wanted to do for a long time. :) Stay tuned!

First Firing!

The first firing is finished! Five have been completed, two are still at school, and two need another firing. Here's what is done so far...

This...did not turn out well, hence the name. I didn't like it going in either. But my professor wanted me to fire it anyway because this is an art in which you just don't know.

A bunch more went into the kiln yesterday. We should be getting them back in a week.

This batch was a soft-tack:

This will be a medium fire:

And these will be a hard fuse:

I'm super excited about how this next batch will turn out. I'm experimenting with colored glass, seeing how things will fire and how things will layer, what floats and what doesn't, etc. I'm going to put the money I make selling these aside to get a kiln of my own and really step it up. :)

Glasswork!

So after sitting through weeks of enameling(an art form I royally stink at) we finally started glasswork this week in art class! I put together my first pieces this week. While some are choosing to start with the basic sandwich of base glass/dichroic/cap sheet, I dove in full-force and started experimenting like crazy.

These are going to be fired to a soft-tack, which means that they'll all melt together, but the piece will keep its shapes, just with softer corners.

This will be fired to medium. This will melt into a sort of blob, but will retain some shape.

These will be fired to a hard finish. The layers of glass will melt into one full layers and the dichroic pieces(the shiny foil-like shards) will melt and disperse and look really cool.

This piece has ridged dichroic in it that will melt into horizontal lines across the surface.

I'm not too excited about this one. I figured I'd fire it for grins and giggles. We'll see what happens.

The foggy spots on the glass are super glue, which is used to hold the pieces of glass together while they get transferred to the kiln. If you work close to the kiln and are very careful you don't even have to use it, you can just plop the pieces on and fire. The glue will burn off clear with no ash.

On Monday I will post the results.

Wikipedia article on Dichroic Glass - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichroic_glass

Coatings by Sandberg(fantastic glass company) glass article - http://www.cbs-dichroic.com/FAQ.asp

Shameless plug for my professor's dichro website - http://www.dichroicinc.com/dichroic-glass.asp