Glass Trailerwhere stained glass art is made

This weekend I finally finished my bowl. After successfully firing one, I brushed on some purple glaze and fired it again after it dried. This morning before leaving the house I checked the kiln see how it turned out. Pretty darn well for a quickly-thrown-oddly-shaped-crappy bowl to test with!

The only problem I saw was that part of the bottom picked up the kiln wash on the bottom. L Overall still pretty happy. Now I’m feeling more confident about taking the time to make something nice and actually have it turn out.

I finally fired the crappy bowl I dehydrated in the kiln. I took a peek this morning before leaving the house and it was intact from what I could see. It was still 600°F in the kiln so I couldn’t really look at it closely.

Little did I know that my kiln had a slow-clay setting on it. That might’ve been useful to know before destroying the good bowl I started with.

Tonight or this weekend I’ll be painting and glazing. Let us see how bad I can screw that up!

So my first thought was that the clay that I was attempting to fire still had internal moisture that would need to be dehydrated. After a few quick searches on the internet I found that it was suggested to keep the kiln at low temp over night before firing. So last night after putzing around in the shop for a while I set the kiln to 150, vented the kiln by propping open the top and the peep hole and let it go for 12 hours.

I immediately wanted to set the kiln to fire up and bisque fire it. But I wasn’t going to be home today and didn’t want to risk another explosion while it was unattended. I’ll sit down tonight and fire it so I can watch it for the first few hours. After the temperature creeps past the boiling point I’ll feel better about leaving it run.

Hopefully it’s not another clay bomb. I just put a malformed bowl in there so it’s not a huge deal if goes kablooey.

So I recently started playing with clay. I have a kiln after all, so why not?

It has been years since I’ve made bowls, pots, mugs and anything else with clay, so it sounded like fun. I made a small bowl, carved it all up with a pretty design and let it dry for a week.

Last night I was out in the shop and saw it was bone dry finally and put it in the kiln. A few hours later I ventured out to take a peek to make sure everything was going fine when I found this.

Oops. I guess I should’ve fired it at low heat for a while first to make sure there was no internal moisture left.

So until then I guess I just make sure quick crappy bowls until I get it figured out. No point in putting all that time into something fancy when this will be the outcome.

Anyone have some tips for me?

I finally got back into the trailer and started some clean up.   I cleaned, I swept and I put some test pieces in the kiln to see if any of my ideas will work out.

I’m not sure what I really want to start with.  A lot of my project ideas will take a good deal of planning.

I also put a coat of gesso on the new canvas so it was pretty much a night of art stuffs.

Have you noticed my blog has been lacking for quite a while? Well there are reasons for that. First off, I took up some painting projects… which has been very fun and I now have a few paintings on my walls. Sweet, right?

Second, and most embarrassing, I locked myself out of the trailer… for weeks. I finally found my spare set of keys and I’ll be able to get back to it! Tonight I’ll be cleaning the abandoned trailer and getting it ready for new projects.

So now is a good time to speak up and send in any ideas you’d like to see made or maybe questions I can answer and demonstrate.

As much as I enjoy checking out the latest and greatest in glass art, I rarely get a chance to play that much with anything new. Enamels aren’t new but I still never got around to trying them out. A few weeks ago I ordered a sample pack of all different colors. Surprisingly they were somewhat costly for little bags of powder! No wonder I don’t get to try new things that often!

Before I research and try something I like to just figure it out on my own before someone tells me how I’m supposed to do it. Powders are pretty straight forward so I wasn’t really worried on messing up anything.

I started by creating some simple templates. I like stars, so I decided to start there. I cut one big and one small one. The small one is about 1″.

I tried mixing the powder into some Klyr-fire or stringer medium. I accidently dumped a bit too much in so my first attempt (the yellow star on dark glitter green) came out a bit smudgy and oozy. So my second attempt (see red star with orange ring on black below) was to just brush some of the Klyr-fire on the glass and then tap some of the powder on… like confection sugar! That worked much better so I randomly played with colors on some scraps for the remaining two pieces.

Oh and then I found some stringers on my work bench so I piled some of those on a scrap piece of glass too, lol.

Each one had their own issues; this is obviously going to take some practice. For instance, the red star had one of its arms break off as I pulled up the template. I tried putting some more enamel down but in the end it didn’t really help. I’m just learning so I didn’t really care THAT much.

After firing I was surprised just how predictable they turned out. Pretty much exactly what I expected…

And a close up:

Mine all turned out like sidewalk chalk on glass. But, now that I’ve played I can go back and research the best methods and give it another go. I’ve seen some amazing final pieces so I’m hoping I can pick up a thing or two for next time!

Sometimes I’m so proud when a design does so well. It can become a bit of a mixed blessing when it does.

I personally like this piece but I’m kind of tired making it over and over again. At some point I’m sure I’ll just have to cut it off and say it’s done and take no more orders. I may make one giant run of these and then be done with it. If you want to order one of these you should speak now or forever hold your peace.

The gingerbread men didn’t turn out L I’m going to have to try again this weekend. The primer and spray that I used both were fused to the glass. I couldn’t even grind that stuff off! I couldn’t even get them out of the molds I made; I had to break them out!

I’m going to have to read up on the technique again. I have this feeling my firing schedule was a little too intense for the project.

Whelp, back to the drawing board. *grumble*

It’s that time of year where we switch away from classic designs and move into a more festive set of projects.

Last weekend I spent some time making gingerbread men molds. Last night I finally had them coated and pre-fired. I crushed some glass and put everything into the kiln before bed.

I took a peek into the kiln this morning (I know! Shame on me!). They’re looking a bit spotty for some reason. I used solid pieces of spectrum solid brown 96 COE. So where the heck are the spots coming from?

You may also notice from the picture that each mold is a different color. I’ve never done much with casting glass, so I’m testing both a shelf primer (pink) and a graphite spray (white) to see which works best. The one time I used graphite spray I don’t think I got enough on the mold and all the glass was stuck to the mold. Even inverting it in the kiln and melting it out didn’t seem to be working well. I was pretty pissed because it was a $50 mold I bought, not one I just made myself. I’ll be able to find out tonight when it’s finally cooled down which worked better (or at all!).

More coming soon… along with gingerbread men decorating!