All I wanted to do is to stretch some glass to make glass shards. Yes those very little thin sharp glass pieces. This is at least my 5th trial and each time the kiln and the glass have a mind of their own.
And Now … I have another good for nothing but fascinating piece that I don’t want to smash into charts.
Happy Fusing!
Last week Lindsey and Chase booked a private session to create their “Love Lamp” with my help and a few minor design suggestions. Both never had made anything in kiln formed glass before, but like to share their creativity with each other.
They definitely wanted to keep the luminescent shine on the Wissmach dark blue glass and the black clear Wissmach Prisma glass. In the first firing I took the kiln up to 1410° F with a 12 minute hold time. The Papyros Paper™ protected the luminescetn coating nicely without leaving a trace behind.
My next concern was the drape firing. I placed the pre-fused rectangle without the Papyros Paper™ cover on a 6″ high stack of Kaiser Lee Board to bend one side down in a 90° angle.
This time I fired the kiln to 1180°F and hold 10 minutes using the smape pieces of Papyros Paper™ a second time to cover the luminescent glass with great success as you can see in the image below.
Some of you might have gotten a warning from Google when you tried to open www.kaiserlee.com. Even so our site was always secure, and our ordering system is encrypted, Google forces you to buy an SSL Certificate and change the address from http to https in order to provide a site without warning. Since we do not want to scare anybody away I spend half a day to install the Certificate on our site. Here is the new and official link to the old/new site.
Any old link will still work, but it will take a little bit longer, before it will be re-directed to the new https site.
When I first saw the Powder Wafers™ glue film from NO DAYS I liked the idea of being able to create any shape in glass that you could cut out of the glue film. You can use scissors and even paper punches. What kept me from trying it was the recommended firing schedule and having to keep the kiln vented for all those hours.
A) 150°F dph to 300°F – hold :45 B) 250°F dph to 600°F – hold :45 C) 250°F dph to 1000°F – hold :45 D)Continue to fire as normal
Yes you can program a kiln and not worry about it. But somehow I shy away from long firing schedules even more so now, since I heard about those relay problems people have encountered. Knock on wood, so far I have not had a relay break on me in 17 years.
Here is the mold I used for my trial. It is a small piece of Kaiser-Lee Board with an indent. I place it in the big kiln with everything else and took the risk of not even venting my kiln. In the future I will use my firing schedule (see below) and fire the pieces in a different kiln which I can vent easily until it reaches a 1000°F. This is the firing schedule I use for small pieces like this one.
A) ramp up 900°F to 1000°F hold :10
B) ramp up FULL to 1410°F hold 10
C) ramp down Full to 900°F hold 15
D) ramp down 100°F to 700°F hold 0 – let cool to room temperature!
Sorry I did not take any pictures before the firing, but here are the steps. First I placed a piece of Papyrus shelf Paper™ in the size of the glass on the mold. Then I placed the 2 Powder Wafers™ butterflies on the paper with a piece of clear glass on top. In the picture you see the the small dish after firing. Yes, it is a single layer of glass with the butterflies fused to the underside.
This is the mold and the Papyrus Paper™ after the firing. Everything is as usual. No glue residue or anything else and I’m really pleased with the crisp look of my butterflies.
In this 3rd picture you can see the mold and the Papyros Paper™ after the firing. Everything is as usual. No glue residue or anything else and I’m really pleased with the crisp look of my butterflies.
