Forging Ahead!

Call me crazy, but even after all of the kiln maladies I've had in the last couple of weeks, I'm experimenting once again! I bought some molds from a fellow Etsyian a few weeks ago and have been eager to try them out ever since. I had a couple of special requests to complete before I could do that, though, which took a bit of time now that I'm back at work for another school year, so today is the first opportunity I've had to get it going. One of the molds that I bought is a sushi plate...nice squarish shape, shallow curve...a very modern look that I really like. The problem was, I had an idea that had been brewing in my mind of what I wanted in a first plate attempt, and none of the glass I have in the studio really worked. So, rather than buying more glass, waiting for it to arrive and then playing around with that, I decided to go ahead and try to make my own custom square of glass using a fiber paper mold.

Now, I'm new to fusing and there may be really good reasons why one shouldn't do this, but being a relative novice, I don't know what they are until I try. (Sometimes things are much less stressful this way!! Until you open the kiln to a disaster, at least.) Using the plate mold as a pattern, I cut a fiber paper mold out of a sheet of 1/4" thick fiber paper that I have on hand. I trimmed the corners to fit so they wouldn't extend out too close to the heating elements and then filled the space up with two different colors of opal frit, swirling it around in a random pattern with my paintbrush, then followed that with a thicker layer of clear. Once I had the base colors set up and the area covered over really well, I evened it out using a small sheet of glass for a straight edge and started adding embellishments. You can see the flecks and chunks of color in the picture above. It doesn't look too exciting here, but keep in mind that there are swirls of opal frit buried underneath the clear that will all melt in together and hopefully stretch out a bit in the finished piece. Depending on the thickness of the glass once it's done firing, I may need to refire it again with a sheet of thin clear added in. That's OK with me, since I may want to add more embellishment at the same time once I see what happens here.

Then, since I like to make good use of a firing when I can, I spread out some red opal frit along the edge of the fiber paper to make some fused "lace". I hope to use it in some upcoming holiday pendants or tiles if it turns out well. I read about this technique when I was browsing through some online fusing projects, but didn't have good luck with it when I actually followed the directions and gave it a try. As it happens, though, the black frit that overflowed from the making of the treble clef symbol I mentioned in my previous blog formed itself up into some passable black "lace" last weekend. It took three re-fillings and re-firings of the treble clef mold before the glass was thick enough to take to the next step, which resulted in three layers of frit overflow around the edges of the fiber paper mold I had cut. (You can see some of that overflow in the picture below.) Without my even trying, I ended up with a couple of really interesting lengths of black frit "lace". (Actually, that was only fair, wasn't it, after all the trouble I'd been having?) I combined the nicer of those bits with some fall colored glass (and some plain white) and fired them yet again to create several new pendants for my shop. They'll be showing up there in the next few days.

I'm really excited to see if this whole experiment ends up being worth the time and the frit! We've been wanting to invest in a new set of dishes for ourselves but just haven't come across a pattern that really excited us. Wouldn't it be sweet if I could just design our own, unique, one-of-a-kind set? Fingers are definitely crossed here....