Frit and Hairspray

We had two Weekend Workshops in January, one Fusing and one Stained Glass, and we're finally getting around to posting about them.   Due to a mishap involving dates the two workshops actually occurred on  three separate weekends, but now that they've been completed we can share what happened during these 3 weekends.  The Fusing Workshop was full with four students Showing up for two days.   Barbara, Jan, Lindsey, and Tanya all arrived on Saturday morning and each put in a full days work.  Not only was it fun but the time actually flew by very quickly.  Although no one was able to take home all of their projects when class ended on Sunday afternoon, they were ready to go on Monday morning.  Pictured below are some of their completed works of art.

 

Making jewelry is a very free-form art and it's a great way to show our students that design and placement skills are not required to make a stunning piece.  Here are all of the small yet complex pieces sitting in our small kiln ready for firing.

 

Here are the same pieces the next day.  The sharp corners have softened and all the glass that was stacked together has fused down to one piece.  We added earring posts and bails after they cooled and they were ready to be worn the next day.

 

One of my favorite projects is the checkerboard platter.  Here you can see all four of our students busy assembling the 180 precision cut pieces. There are only three colors along with a clear glass used in this project.  Overlapping colors make the forth color which gives these finished platters their unique woven look. 

 

There are actually three layers of glass in this piece. After each of the square layers have been assembled they are held in place with dots of hairspray.  This is one of the platters ready to enter the kiln.
  

 

Everyone loves the flower bowl and this is another project where there's no right or wrong to worry about while assembling it.  You just lay out chips of glass to form the outline of the flowers and then add streamers to the mix.  From here on out we just fill in the outlines with various colors of crushed glass.

 

Once the flowers look good the top is liberally coated with large clear frit which looked a lot like crushed ice.  After that we move along to the next project

 

Fritography is the art of painting with powdered glass.  For our Birch Tree Dishes we start with a square of yellow glass.  We then anchor a border piece along each edge of the glass once again using hairspray to anchor the borders down.  Four small strips of white glass are used to form the tree trunks and as you can see below someone was feeling creative and gave one of the birch trees a smaller branch as well.  

 

Using brushes, bent spoons, and even an earwax vacuum(!) other colors are added layer by layer until we get the autumn scene pictured below.

 

There was so much going on that I couldn't possibly cover it all so hopefully this was enough to whet your appetite.  Here's a final closer look at some of the finished pieces (click it to see an enlarged view).

If you're interested in taking a Fusing Workshop just call us at 337-836-2945 to find out about openings and dates.  We do have vacancies yet in April. It's a fun class and in two days you end up with not one, two or even three, but five projects!   Whoever thought that playing with glass could be so fun?

Paul

Bayou Salé GlassWorks

Guacamole and Chocamole

We had another Fusing Workshop recently that was attended by two of our regular Stained Glass Class students, Becky and Martha.  We had a lot of fun and we covered a lot of aspects of using a kiln.  In fact, so much was covered that we're only going to look at a few projects in depth. 

Let's start by looking at the six projects that our students made. Here are all of Becky's completed items.  We've even put two castoff chunks of pattern  bar remnants in the kiln which made a pair of interesting pendants.

 

And here is Martha's fusing exhibit.  She was concerned about her checker platter because towards the end things weren't lining up as perfectly as she hoped but as you can see everything fused together wonderfully.

After learning about the tools and the basics of using a kiln Becky and Martha started off by designing some jewelry.  Once everything was cut and set into position the pieces were carefully transferred onto a kiln shelf which Russ carried to the small kiln where they would be fused later that night.

 

Here's a close look at the jewelry that Martha and Becky made.  It's all created from Dichroic Glass so the colors all shift into different hues and saturations depending on what angle light is hitting them.  Becky was so concerned that she didn't have an eye for jewelry making but everything turned out beautiful and seven she was pleased with the results.

 

Next up we have the start of a Pattern Bar which admittedly doesn't look like much at this stage of the game.  It's just stacks of overlapping colored glass with empty areas for the glass to slide into and curve around the other colors as they 'melt'.  Actually, when it's completed it looks more like an iPhone cover more than anything you'd make a dish out of.

 

Here's a look at a Pattern Bar after it is fused.  Those 30+ odd pieces of glass are now one thick chunk of glass with no spaces between them at all.

 

The pattern bar is then run through a tile saw four times  along the length giving us four cross sections that are arranged to form two separate mirror images.  Those two sections are surrounded by a double layer of black glass and then fused together one last time.  Below you can see that the pattern bars have a matte finish after being cut but once everything is fused they will shine once again.

 

And here is the finished piece along with two small drop offs of the pattern bar which fused into oval pendants which can be used for just about anything.

 

Next up we see one of the Poppy Bowls under construction.  Before we give it a bowl shape a 'blank' must be created which is a flat plate of glass which holds the poppy design.  If we started it off in a bowl shaped mold all the glass would run to the bottom once it started fusing.   

 

Here the designing phase is completed and everything has been covered in a coarse clear frit which will melt and form a nice smooth clear top surface over the poppies that you can see in the picture above.

 

Once everything is fused together the 'blank' enters the kiln one last time resting atop a bowl shaped mold.  Less heat is used in this final pass through the kiln.  There's just enough heat to slump the plate into a bowl shape while not allowing the piece to completely melt which would case the design to run or melt to the bottom of the bowl.

And lastly, although we skipped the making of the Fossil Vitra dish, here's a closeup of one of them.  It's made with an actual leaf but we're going to leave the making of this piece a mystery until we cover our next Fusing Workshop in October.

It was a fun weekend, very full, and very rewarding.  The process is completely different from anything our students do in our standard Stained Glass Classes so everyone is always amazed at how things work in the Fusing Class.  In October we'll look at the Fossil Vitra dish and the Checkerboard Platter in more depth.  See you then (if not sooner!)

Paul
Bayou Salé GlassWorks

Wash It Down With Hairspray

We held our first ever fusing workshop on March 14 & 15 and it was a huge success. Since this workshop was a trial run for myself and Paul we only had 2 students, Susan & Natalie, attending. Even though everything went well we did  find out that there will have to be a few small tweaks made for future workshops.  Our next workshop is scheduled for June and we'll have 3 students attending that one.


Day 1

We started out the first day with a discussion to familiarize our  students with kilns, firing schedules, molds, glass compatibility and other aspects of fusing glass. Each student had a work station with a Beetle Bits cutting system  and various hand tools.  The next order of business was to explain how to use the cutting system to make the different types of cuts we would be doing in the workshop. The Beetle Bits cutting system is easy to use and is essential for making the precise repetitive cuts that our projects require.

Next we had a circle cutting demonstration and everyone cut the glass circles that would be used later for making their 9" bowl. Then we started the first phase of our Fossil Vitra project by painting striations on the first two pieces of glass to make it look like a slab of rock, then coating our "fossil" leaf with powdered glass.

These pieces then need to be set aside to dry before we can continue so we moved on to our jewelry project where we would create a pendant and earrings set using dichroic glass. After we finished assembling the pieces we put them in the small kiln and fired it up.

After we finished with the jewelry we resumed work on the Fossil Vitra projects that had dried by then. First we carefully placed our leaf in a prepared dam mold, then carefully placed the first piece of glass on top of it painted side down,  Next we place the clear iridized piece of glass on top of the first piece painted side down as well.  Before we knew it these projects are ready to go in the kiln.

Next we started the Autumn Birch Fritography Dish.  Fritography is "painting" a picture using different colors of crushed glass instead of paint.  Frit is available in several textures ranging from powder to coarse pebble sized pieces.

After finishing our fritography image we took a break for lunch. We had one of our workshop staples, Taco Soup.  It was relaxing to take a little break from the busy morning while enjoying some good food.

When we finished with lunch we started on the most intense and time consuming project of the workshop, the Checker Platter. This project is made from 180 precision cut pieces of glass that are stacked 3 layers deep. This project would be next to impossible to make accurately without the use of a cutting system. After all the pieces are cut I find that it is easier to keep everything aligned by building half of  the first pattern layer against a straight edge while securing the pieces down with drops of hairspray and then placing the project into the dam mold before continuing the building process.

 

Our final project of the first day was creating a Pattern Bar.  We stacked many strips of different color and width glass in a mold, leaving gaps and voids so that when the glass melts down the colors would bend and flow creating plenty of movement. 

That took us to the end of the first day and before we left we stacked everything in the kiln to fire over night.

Day 2

On Sunday morning when everyone came back in the large kiln had completely run its cycle but was still too hot to open.  This was expected but the small kiln with the jewelry was already at room temperature so we started working on jewelry while the large kiln continued to cool down.

Our first task of the day was gluing bail loops on the pendants and posts on the earrings which then gave us our first completed projects of the workshop. Then we started on our 9" bowl projects. For this we had to make mosaic size frit by cutting strips of glass and breaking them into small pieces with our nipping pliers. Next we took the circles we cut the day before and placed them in prepared dam molds. I used the torch to heat and bend some glass noodles for stems and leaves. Then the flowers were constructed with the frit we had made,  and then we added center colors  and confetti embellishments.  At this point we were almost done. Susan opted to use black turning her flowers into poppies, while Natalie opted to use yellow to make her flowers look like roses.

Then we buried the whole project with a layer of clear coarse frit and it was ready for the kiln just in time for us to eat a lunch of White Chicken Chili.

After lunch, the large kiln had cooled down enough to open and we got our first peek at Mo and Sho's projects from the day before.

With the large kiln opened we were then able to return to the Fossil Vitra projects as we remove the two pieces from the mold and washed them to remove the ash and releasing agents.   Here's our first glimpse of the leaf fossils. 

We prepped the mold yet again and placed the glass back into the mold fossil side up.  Next we added a few chips of dichroic for color, sparkle, and general accents and then we covered the surface with a coarse clear frit.  We added a dusting of  a orangish-red powdered frit and then spritzed it with hairspray to wash the powder deeper into the frit.  After all that it was ready to return to the kiln.  Then we were ready to begin our final project of the workshop, the pattern bar dish. To begin this project I took the pattern bars that were made the day before and sliced them into quarter inch strips using a tile saw. This is the process that reveals the hidden beauty of the pattern bar.

We then cut four blackborder strips and a center spacer before assembling our final piece. 

All the projects we made on Sunday then went back to the kiln to fire overnight. Over the next couple of days I re-fired all of the pieces on slumping molds to give them their shape.

And these are our students completed projects.  On the left we have Natalies (Sho) pieces and on the right we have Susan's (Mo).

If anyone wants to participate in this workshop, they should get in touch with us ASAP. The 2015 schedule is full and we have started filling spots in the 2016 schedule. For more information visit our Fun With Fusing webpage at  www.bsgw.biz/fuseshop.html.

Russ
Bayou Salé GlassWorks