Glasswork: using cold glass.

This week in glass we were doing more work using cold glass. I designed and made a tile from two sheets of glass, with copper wire and copper foil inside for the decoration. I wanted to stay with the nature theme so I cut leaves out, and then used the copper wire and small pieces of copper foil to make it look as though it was windy, like the leaves were being blown about.

i washed and dried the glass sheets carefully, so as to not leave any marks on them, because the marks would stay there through the firing.

The tiles were put in the kiln on ceramic fibre paper, and were fired up to 810 degrees, so the glass sheets were fully fused together.

We then filled the moulds we made in the last session. for the half-mould, I filled it up to about twice its depth, because it needs more glass than it looks like it should to make up for the air in between the glass pieces.

these were then put into the kiln to fire, so the pieces of glass would melt and fill the mould. 

I weighed out the glass for my rose mould, using a glass:wax ratio of 2.55:1. my wax weighed 87g, and so i calculated that i would need 221 grams of glass. I weighed out 225, in case some of the glass stuck to the inside of the reservoir instead of all flowing into the mould. These were also put into a kiln, on ceramic fibre paper in case any of the glass overflowed and dripped onto the kiln floor.