Building a Stained Glass Window

Before I started Seazening with Glass, I wrote about building a stained glass window from start to finish on my other blog, Seazening. 

Well, I started the window and then set it aside to complete a stained glass lamp shade, many fused glass birds, and attending glass classes...... not to mention that Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's all happened, too.

I am returning to my window today and I am so excited! 

Here is the first post:


I have decided to challenge myself and make matching stained glass windows for the side lights (windows) on either side of my front door.

I want to share the process with you.

First, I measured the space the windows would cover  (5 3/8" x 62 7/8").  Then I measured and drew out of border.  Then I designed the window.  I ended up doing this process 3 times until I got the design I wanted.

After that, I colored the design the way I wanted the window to look.
That completes the work for day 1.

And here is where I am today.......

My Joan Miro has turned more into a Joan Delony

Remember the post about the glass piece I did that reminded me of Joan Miro's artwork?

Well, I did tac it onto a piece of 8x8 glass.  It came out beautifully.  BUT, when I put it into the frame, the corner cracked!!!

So, I pulled it out, glue the corner, added some irid frit to cover the crack and help solidify the piece.  To even it out, I added a little bit of irid frit to the piece itself and to the diagonal corner.  

  I re-fired it using my own schedule, bringing it up to temperature very slowly and annealing for a bit longer.  The piece came out fine. But now it seemed a bit "over done".
Compare the journey:

And finally, hanging on the wall.

Zerds

My latest creation: Zerds
 That is Zentangle Birds!

This is truly a work in progress, but I want to share the progress with you.

To start, I drew some Zentangle designs and took them to the sign maker to have a silk screen burned.  Unfortunately, I had purchased a size 110 mesh screen.  You will see why this is unfortunate in a minute.

It had been a while since I had done any silk screening, so I had to practice with the set up and squeegee methods. Then I had to practice mixing the paint (enamel powder and squeegee oil) to the right consistency.  Needless to say, I made a mess.  I didn't photo this process because there was paint everywhere and I didn't want to contaminate my phone!  It took several tries, but I was finally ready to print the glass.

The first attempt ended up in a washout.  Literally, I washed the paint off the glass.  Same  procedure followed for the next two printings.  I finally got something I felt I could go with.  So I printed a 12x12 piece of Spectrum 96 white glass and a smaller piece of yellow glass.  The lines in Zentangle are fine, but the mesh was not, so the prints came out pretty heavy.  The designs were recognizable, but not fine.  Still no photos -- sorry.

I fired the first printing and it was a further disaster.  Because I was using high-temp enamel paint, I fired on a full fuse (1450).  The single sheet of glass bubbled up pretty badly.  Oops!  I did get some workable glass out of it though. 

With this glass, I created the Zerd below.

This piece was OK, but the paint looks muddled to me.  The tail, wing, beak, and feet are out of dichroic glass.  I think the tail is off and would look better placed closer to the body.  Since this bird is made of a single glass base, I fired it on a contour fire which gives the layered dichroic glass some dimension.  I am trying to become a fan of dichroic glass, but I am reluctant.  I like bright colors better than shiny colors.

Here is the second piece I did.

Pretty bad.  I was also experimenting with a few other techniques with this creation so they added to the "badness".  First off, I tried doubling all the glass to make a sturdier sculpture.  I tried to do all of this in one firing.  Mistake #1.  When you fire glass to a full fuse, the glass pieces literally melt into each other and fuse completely to become one piece of glass.  This makes the whole piece flat and very glossy.  The glossy, I like.  The flat, I don't.

Further more, some of the glass pieces shifted during firing.  Notice the left leg.  I placed a copper rod between the two pieces of the legs for mounting and to add rigidity.  The glass slipped and the rod is exposed.  The tail pieces shifted as well.   See the yellow dot on top of the right wing?  That dot was placed at the base of the tail. 

However, the most disappointing aspect of this piece is the way the paint lost its definition.  As the glass spreads when hot to about a 1/4 in. thickness, the design also spread.

Back to the drawing board.

I have since redrawn the Zentangle masters into the shape of birds and will have a new screen made using 160 mesh screen.  This will keep the paint from being screened too heavily onto the glass, thus ending up with a clear piece of tangled fused glass. 

Stay tuned for the outcome.

School of fish

First off, Happy New Year to all of you!  May your 2016 be the best year you've had thus far.

As I said, I really enjoy working with mosaics.  

I am working on a wall sculpture that will consist of 10-12 fish swimming in a school.  The fish are about 10" long and 6" tall.  

Right now, I am still experimenting with the technique and look.   Thus far, I have created 3 fish using slightly different techniques, combinations, and firing schedules.  However, they all look similar.  Since they will be placed on a wall approximately 10' up the wall, the difference won't be readily noticed.

I started out with a basic shape fish in clear glass, then I placed randomly cut sized and shaped pieces of transparent glass on the fish form.  I am using an Ombre color scheme going from blue to green with a few pieces of clear irid glass in the middle.

I start out gluing the mosaic pieces to the form, then tac fire to set the pieces.  After that, I will grout, embellish (I used red glass circles or frit) and fire again to a tac fuse so the fish would have some texture giving them some dimension.  I also used some 1/8" fiber paper to give the fish some contour.  

This is what I have so far.  I am still experimenting, but will post as I go along until the piece is finished.

Fish #2.  Hopefully you can see the contouring in these photos.  However, I fired this fish to a full fuse which took away the textured finish.  I used transparent red frit on this fish.  Not my favorite treatment.

Fish #3 going into the kiln for the 2nd firing and after firing.  I created glass dots out of a deep red opaque glass.  

You can see the difference here where I used a tac fuse.  The glass pieces stand out.

 I have placed these 3 fish on the wall to get a perspective.

Fish #1 on the far right has glass dots in a cherry red.  Too bright!  I like the deeper red dots.  I will probably make most of the fish like fish #3, but will copy fish #1 and 2 at least once more to give the school continuity.  Either that, or I will eliminate them all together.

However, I may not be through experimenting either!  

Mosaics

I really enjoy working with mosaics.  I have created several ceramic mosaic pieces and even completed on glass mosaic, but have not done a mosaic piece for fusing.

The first piece I completed was on a 6x6 tile of clear glass.  I formed a fish using several colors of transparent glass in blues and greens.  I cut odd shaped random sized pieces from each color.  Then I filled in around the fish with clear glass cut the same way.  Newy Fagan helped out by filling in some of the larger gaps with smaller clear glass pieces (which enhanced the overall look).  The tile was then fired to a tac* fuse (the glass adheres but doesn't become fully fused leaving texture).
Then, using a mixture of CMC (a cellulose fiber used as a binder in foods like taco shells) and glass powder (black in this case), the glass pieces were grouted.  The tile was then fired again using a tac* fuse  to leave the texture and here are the results.

I wish I had used a different color for the face than dark blue, but I didn't know what it was going to come out looking like!

I really got into this method of creating.  So much so that I used it again twice! during the workshop.

Here is a second piece.  This tile was also created on clear glass.  I used a turquoise powder for the grout.  Then I fused the whole piece onto white glass to give the design more contrast.  

This tile was fired on a full fuse, therefore, the glass is flat.

I like the blue powder, but think a darker blue would give the piece more contrast.

*  Newy has her own firing schedules, so technically, I don't know that she calls the schedule we used as a "tac" fuse.  But for the beginner mind, like myself, I am using terms that can more easily be conveyed.  The terms I use are "slump, tac, contour, and full" when talking about firing schedules.

Inclusion

Inclusion is placing glass or other items between glass before firing.  Most of the time, glass is stacked (placed on top of another piece of glass).  Products like Mica powder have to be used between the glass.  Inclusion gives interesting results.  The most notable are the tiny air bubbles created where air is trapped between the glass.  When items are placed between two pieces of glass, a small space is created between the glass.  As the glass warms and begins to fuse together, some of the air from the space is trapped and forms small air bubbles.

I did this piece experimenting with copper mesh, dichroic (metallic looking) glass, stringer, and decals.  I like the shapes, color, and movement of abstract art.

Recently, I tried a piece of copper mesh between float glass (window glass).  I fired it to a contour fire (not quite as hot as a full fire).  I don't really notice any air bubbles in this piece.  What you can't really see above is there are tiny air bubbles inside the mesh of the copper pieces above.

In the piece below, I placed a green grape vine leaf in between two pieces of float glass and fired to a contour.  Most of the leaf burned off and left an ash impression.  There is a small piece in the middle that didn't burn off completely.  When I picked up the glass the small leaf piece slipped.  Had I used a full fire (higher temperature than contour), I believe the entire leaf would have burned off.  I will definitely do this again.  I like the results. 

My personal Joan Miro art

I love the work of the artist Joan Miro.  In fact, when I was in my 20's, I had a signed and numbered print of his.  But as youth goes, it got lost in the moves, etc.  I was too naive at the time to know what I had.  

At any rate, while working with Newy Fagan in her studio, I experimented with combing glass.  This technique involved raking warm glass with a combing tool (similar to a metal chopstick for reference).  

Combing proved to be more difficult for me than I thought it would be.  First of all, I didn't expect the heat of the kiln to be as intense as it was.  I had never had a hot kiln open more than a few seconds to look at the progress of my work.  Also, the glass was not as fluid as I had imagined it to be.  The only experience I had at this point with hot glass was working with molten glass during glass blowing.

In building the glass tile to comb, I used rod pieces that made small circles as well as some string, curly glass pieces that Newy made by pouring molten glass on a piece of sheet metal.

I combed the piece the best I could and then Newy took a go at it.  It turns out, the small round pieces of color were really too small to get much of a design out of with the combing technique.

The piece was left in the kiln to anneal.  The next morning, when we opened the kiln to look at it, the tile had cracked in 3 pieces.  But I loved it.  Why? because it reminded me of the work of Joan Miro.

I brought the pieces home and resurrected the tile by adding a few more colored circles and black curly pieces then firing to a full fuse.

This is what I got.  To many of you, it won't look like much, but to me, I get a good feeling looking at it because of its resemblance to the work of one of my favorite artists.  Joan Miro created work on an entirely different level than this, but the elements are there.

I plan on tac fusing it to a piece of 8x8 clear glass and framing it in black to hang as wall art. the colored pieces that look like they are dripping are the parts that were combed while in the kiln.  Beauty is definitely in the  eye of the beholder!

Joan Miro: