A few more steps along the learning curve

I had a chance to throw a few more things in the kiln last week and learn a bit more:

	One piece is from the last firing. Notice how dark the purple the blue became. It still looks cool, but I expected it to be a bit lighter. Also, there was a faint white-ish circle around the edge - a consequence of a too small clear glass top layer. I talked to my local guru - Susan from Glass by Susan. Following her advice, I used the grinder to take the current cloudy circle off, then used a new finer grinder bit to take away the rough marks made by the normal grinder bit.
	I also recently ordered some glass paints and a few decals for pendants. I created simple square, triangular, and oval patterns and chose simple colors that would serve as hopefully nice backgrounds for the details from paint and decals. To make sure I didn't run into the same ghosted edge from the clear top layer, each of the pendants have a second layer (clear on top or, for one, purple on bottom) that are about 1/4 inch larger on all sides than the main piece.
	Finally, I tossed in two coasters using a simple design with more transparent glass than I used on the earlier coasters.

I'm definitely getting closer to pieces that I'm really happy with. But, I made a major error in this firing with spacing. I knew that the glass would shrink a little with firing but didn't factor in its expansion, before contraction, during the firing. So, several of my single pieces became double pieces.

	The ghosted circle disappeared from the purple/dichroic pendant perfectly, however that pendant fused together with the square pendant to the side of it. I'll need to cut them apart, grind, and refire. (Susan's line "never refuse to re-fuse" is surprisingly catchy.) The orange and blue/purple pendants turned out pretty close to perfect, however. They're ready for my first attempts at painting and decal details. More on that in the next few weeks.
	I think the 1/4" border all around is a bit too large for the pendants. It looks cool when the background is a color but the light blue pendant shows how it's a bit too much, relative to what I like, when the larger piece is clear. The bottom piece is a portion of a really pretty square fired by one of Susan's friends. The dichroic clear fused with blue was so pretty that I wanted to own it, before I even owned a kiln and before I had any idea what I could do with it. On the last fire, all of the iridized detail was lost once fused with a background color. Following Susan's advice, for this firing, I stuck with clear and the iridized detail is still visible. That one will soon have a cool turtle decal, once I have a few more things ready. The decals will only work with a lower temperature (~1400 degrees) so all fusing has to be done before I try that.
	Lastly, the coasters. I actually really love how the more transparent glass looks on the coasters, enough that I want to make much more. However, these too were placed too closely together, giving the expansion of the glass. On the right, bottom, there also looks too be evidence that the 1/4" glass border is larger than I want. I'll cut them apart, cut off the extra clear, grind, and try to perfect them the next time I fire up the kiln.

All that will probably have to wait for a week or so. One of my sisters has been visiting with her children and that's kept me far too busy to play with the kiln (or, before now, to catch up on notes from the last firing). I'm headed to Jacksonville to hang out with them more tomorrow and all playing with glass will have to be put on hold for a bit.

Lessons learned: 

• Don't place items too close together in the kiln!
• 1/4" border is probably a little too big for clear, but looks neat as a frame.

pendants attempt #3

I'm moving past coasters and trying my hand out at making a few simple pendants. My first 2 tries were complicated by the kiln breaking the circuit and using a mold that had too much kiln wash on it. I stopped at the glass store today and learned that the woman there never uses molds for her pendants. Yay! No mold = easier life. I just set these up in the kiln. I'll be able to see how they turned out when I wake up tomorrow.

	Top pendant = coe90: base layer-  dichroic with a rumpled texture top layer - clear Bottom pendant = coe96: base layer- light blue scrap glass top layer - part of previously fused iridized blue glass with clear. Two corners of this have the rounded Edited to add: I didn't take pictures of these results but the dichroic one turned out awesome, though less black then in the original glass. The only thing I might change would be to make the top layer slightly larger. It was pretty enough that I gave it away as a gift before having a chance to take a picture. The iridized, however, turned out like a big blue blob. Although placing the iridized glass on top of a light layer brought out the colors, fusing them together made the iridized bits invisible. I tossed that in the mistakes pile, possibly to be incorporated into some other project eventually.
	Top pendant = coe90: base layer-  dichroic red/grey top layer - clear Bottom pendant = coe90: base layer-  dichroic lizard print, purple striker glass top layer - clear Edited to add: The top pendant came out great, though more green/yellow and less red than I would have guessed. I also would have given it a slightly bigger top layer if I had it to do again. This one is also already given away as a gift. The bottom pendant had a few issues, to be discussed resolved in future fires. I knew that the blue glass would turn more purple upon being fired (it was marked as glass that would strike this way when I bought it). But, as you can see in later posts, it came out so dark a purple that it effectively looks to be black. As with the other dichroic glass, a lot of the black came out of the glass. The largest issue is that the clear piece on top is smaller than the bottom pieces and the grinded edge of the clear showed up as a cloudy circle around the top of the fired piece.
	This has been fused twice using the mold but has a bumpy texture from the uneven kiln wash. I'm hoping that this third firing outside of the mold will give it a nice clean, shiny polish. Edited to add: I had forgotten about the rule that fused glass likes to be about 1/4" thick. Inside of the mold, I could add multiple layers to make a deeper pendant. Not constrained my a mold, this turned out cool but ginormous. It could make a really big pendant but I suspect I'll use it for something else one day. Josh suggested using it as a garden marker, which I really like. It's tossed in the mistakes pile, perhaps to be revisited someday.

For these, I used the same firing schedule as before:

Starting Temp	Ending Temp	Rate Per Hour	Minutes to Hold
Room temp	1100	300	0
1100	1240	150	30
1240	1480	max	10
1480	900	150	45

Lessons learned:

• Dichroic glass is very pretty, and loses a lot of the black bottom layer when fired. 
• Iridized glass should be the bottom layer, to maintain it's shimmer. A follow up conversation with Susan suggests that the iridized layer would burn off if placed on the top layer of a piece (turned outside, I think). 
• A clear top layer needs to be a bit larger than the bottom layer to avoid having a cloudy ring from the grinded edge
• Remember that glass likes to be too layers thick
• Take pictures before you give things away. :)

One electrician's visit later

I've done 4 fires now, 3 of which were interrupted when the kiln overloaded the circuit. Yesterday, an electrician came through and I am now $100 poorer but the kiln will actually make it through a full cycle. I went through another fire yesterday. Another fire, another lesson - If you really really get impatient and want to look at the glass to see how it's doing. Do NOT do that right around 900 degrees when, apparently, it's aligning molecules in a way minimize stress on the glass. I'll skip the photo of the broken coaster and just remember this lesson for next time.

However, I've been reading up on how to make pendants. I should be able to make some pretty things once I get a few hours to work on it this weekend!

Getting up to speed

I'm planning to use this blog as a place to keep notes while I learn more about working with glass. I've learned a lot about making stained glass pieces over the last year and just bought my first kiln.

So far, I've only done 2 fires. Here's what I've figured out so far. Fire #1
I VERY quickly cut 90coe glass into a 4x4in clear glass for the top and 4 1x1 in colored squares of glass for the bottom.

	Just before fusing. Next time I should make sure everything is lined up more exactly.
	Just after fusing.

Then I did another fire with two new coasters using a modified design and refiring one of the coasters from the previous fire with a few pieces of glass on top.

Just before fusing.	Just after fusing. placing the glass on top led to less exact, fluid lines
Just after fusing. Part of the yellow was two pieces that still shows a line. The guy at the glass shop said this would go away with a longer soak at 1480. But, the kiln tripped the circuit breaker at some point so I'm not actually sure how long of a soak this had.	Just after fusing. Having an extra slice of clear led to a line. As with the other one, apparently a longer soak is the way to solve this but, since the circuit breaker was tripped, there's no way to know how long of a soak it had.

Starting Temp	Ending Temp	Rate Per Hour	Minutes to Hold
Room temp	1100	300	0
1100	1240	150	30
1240	1480	max	10
1480	900	150	45

Lessons to remember for future fires:

• cut and line up glass very carefully
• a single piece of glass laid on top of a layer will, when it becomes liquid, ooze outwards a bit. Use only when you're ok with having that effect.
• I need an isolated circuit for my kiln