Finished Slumped Fused Scrap Glass

Well here is the finished product of my patchwork 8” square slumped dish. This was created by making part sheets with glass powders sifted over stencils and found objects. The individual pieces are full fused then cut up and arranged to fit the square dish mold and then slumped. The designed part sheets are only one layer of 3mm glass, either clear or white opal. There is some waste as you have to trim off the edges of the part sheets where they shrink in and get a bit thicker then the center. Its not completely a waste as you can make frit or use pieces for jewelry etc.

Here is one more piece I recently completed. This bowl utilized a lot of scrap clear glass left over from cutting out large clear circles. The base piece was an opal piece of gray glass. Next I cut up the scrap clear glass into random sized pieces. Next I shifted Light Cyan 216 bulleye powder over the base gray piece and gently placed the clear scraps all over the powder layer. I made one slight mistake when putting this together. I picked up all the clear scrap pieces and set them in the bowl mold. Unknowingly the pieces got contaminated with kiln wash powder left on the mold.....darn. Won’t do that again. So when it was full fused some of the kiln powder showed up in the clear spaces between the layers of glass. Not all but some. I liked the piece so thought hard.....what can i do to save it? I got out my ColorLine paints and carefully added white to the most noticable areas where the kiln powder showed up. I also added some of the cyan glass powder to other areas less noticable and did a second full fuse. Turned out very acceptable and it turned out to be a more interesting piece. Sometimes glass is more forgiving than you think, so don’t give up to soon if something goes wrong.

Both of these pieces are good examples of designing with scrap glass. I dont have a lot of room for storing a lot of scrap so I try to use it up as it accumulates. Sometimes it gets your creative juices going figuring out ....”what can I do with those scraps”.