Pot Melts and Problems

This hasn't been my week for successful glass work. Last weekend, after carefully setting up the kiln for a pot melt, I selected a combination of glass that I thought would melt into something cool, washed each piece to make sure I hadn't left any dust or dirt behind, filled my little terra cotta pot, closed the lid on the kiln, and programmed in the cycle recommended in my glass fusing book. Everything seemed to be going along swimmingly until I checked the melt about mid-way through the hold...For some unknown reason, the pot had tipped over and spilled hot glass all over the kiln shelf around the dish that I had placed for it to melt into. Since this was my first-ever attempt at a pot melt, I still don't understand what happened in there, so I'm not sure how to prevent it happening again, but what can you do? As the cycle finished and the glass cooled, half of it stuck inside the pot rather than flowing out the bottom as intended since the pot was sitting on its side. Then, after the kiln had cooled, I reopened it to find that much of the glass that had spilled out just crumbled when I picked it up for some strange glass-related-chemistry reason. Fortunately, none of the spilled glass stuck to the shelf and nothing was damaged inside the kiln, so it wasn't all bad...and I did get a couple of interesting pieces of spilled and spread glass out of it...so it wasn't a total pot melt loss! I had such high hopes for the real result, though, that I was very disappointed.

Once I recovered from the whole pot melt melt-down, ;-), school started! For three solid days this past week I attended endless staff meetings and inservices as we all returned to work and began to make the transition from summer vacation to classroom. It is always exciting to see everyone again and hear "what they did on their summer vacation"...but reality arrived quickly enough as we gathered up class lists, set up assignments, learned new online grading systems and new office/word processing software, found new classrooms, met new staff, etc., etc., etc. Information overload definitely kicked in and we headed home each day with glazed eyes and tired brains. No mental energy for studio work on those days, that's for sure. Thankfully we have a long weekend to regroup and reenergize before the students arrive on Tuesday and I did manage to get a batch of glass in the kiln on Friday! Interestingly enough, though, my glass woes were not over.

Saturday morning came and I opened the kiln to discover that the square tile that I had put in a plate mold to slump had developed HUGE bubbles! I have never opened the kiln to something like this before, so after the pot melt surprise the weekend before I just couldn't believe it. (The kiln gods must be upset with me about something....) After taking the piece out of the kiln and looking at the mold, I did discover that the air hole on the plate mold was plugged with a thin little film of kiln wash, which I'm going to assume was the culprit. Although it doesn't look salvageable at the moment, I'll let it float around back in the artistic subconscious for a while before abandoning it all together--in hope that a potential repair or rework idea will rise to the surface. With any luck at all it will be back at some point in the future, looking all nice and shiny and beautiful--and I'll probably never forget to check the vent hole ever again, either.

You would think that that would have been enough troubles for one week, wouldn't you? But no, there's more. I had promised someone that I would have a custom piece ready for them on Saturday morning. On Friday, all that was left to do was to glue on an Aanraku bail and set it somewhere safe to dry. No problem, right? I use Devcon's slow-cure epoxy and have never, ever, ever had any sort of problem with it. Until Saturday. I went downstairs to get the pendant and wrap it up...only to discover that the bail was still sliding around on the back of it in a film of non-hardened epoxy slurry. Good grief! So....I got out the fingernail polish remover, cleaned off all of the yuck, mixed new epoxy and started over. Now if I used the quick-cure epoxy it all would have been OK, as that hardens up fairly quickly. Not so the slow-cure. It takes several hours to finalize the curing process (which results in a much stronger bond--a good thing that is worth waiting for as a rule) and meant that the piece was not ready for wearing yesterday morning as planned. Fortunately, the special requestee in this case is an understanding friend, but it is never a good feeling to run in to unexpected inconsistencies in a product you have used successfully for a long time.

It might be reasonable to expect that after a week like this I would just throw up my hands and step away from the studio for a bit. Completely understandable under the circumstances, I think! But, no, call me the eternal optimist...or...muleheaded, whichever you think is more appropriate, but I put another batch of glass in the kiln yesterday. Here's a fiber paper mold that I cut as a special request for a friend who is a musician and wanted to know if I could make her a pendant out of the treble clef symbol. I thought about doing a freeze-n-fuse, but I didn't have any of the supplies and wasn't sure I wanted to spend what it would cost to launch a whole new technique right now, so I opted for a hand-cut mold first just to see if I could make it work before I tried something else. I found a child's coloring page for a pattern, paperclipped the pattern to a 1/4" thick piece of fiber paper and used a craft knife to carefully cut it out. It came out pretty OK, so I had hope for success! After I got that done, I started working on a couple of other small tiles, one for a special request from a family member and one because I had made three kite shapes earlier in the summer that slid a little sideways and weren't quite what I wanted but that were too nice to waste. Here's a shot of the kiln prior to firing:

Wish Me Luck!!