The paperweight class I’d signed up for at the Mesa Art Center, though cancelled three times in a row, went off fine the fourth time I registered for it, and I was able to make three paperweights.  We were having trouble with the crucible kiln not clicking shut properly, and the glass got too cool, which is why they are such a hefty size (four inches in diameter).

This was my first one. Since I hadn’t done any hotshop for almost a year, I decided to make it simple and simply roll the first gather of glass in the mixed frit.  Ironically, the simplest technique makes the most interesting, most complex paperweight.

This was one of the cups I threw with my share of the batch of porcelain that some of our classmates mixed up.  I had some of Kurt Weiser’s cobalt underglaze that Bridget Harper (my ceramics teacher and friend) cadged for me.  I’ve done underglaze or stain on porcelain many, many times. This is a design based off of some wrapping paper I got from a stationary store years ago. I’ve done another piece with this type of design, using a sgraffito technique, but the two look very dissimilar.

This was one of a series I made from my share of the batch of porcelain we mixed up.  I tend to throw 1/4 of an inch walls on my pottery, and I’ve gotten out of the habit of trimming down to 1/8 or 1/16 of an inch walls, which is really what this porcelain wants, but this one, at least, didn’t get cracked, unlike the one with the birds on it.  This design is inspired by a swatch of upholstery cloth that a friend of mine gave me a few years ago.

Knowing that this tray had a large likelyhood of breaking in the kiln, I decided not to spend too much time on the cobalt design. I wanted to try it out. This is Kurt Weiser’s own cobalt formula. I’ve done cobalt on porcelain so often, I daresay it’s my trademark.  This worked a lot better than the plain cobalt stains that I’ve used in the past. It didn’t fade nearly as much. Of course, getting the correct amount of overglaze is, well, there’s an art to it.

Here’s another thing that people do when they make fused glass pieces; they make slumped bowls and trays.  I had less enthusiasm for this, because I’m a potter, and pottery makes functional, sturdy, dishwasher-safe pieces that don’t cost $60 in raw materials.

There’s a flaw in one of the bands because I tried to cut it while sitting down.  Apparently, you can’t do that.  I ruined a lot of glass before someone told me.  After I stood up, my cuts came out right.  I was so impressed by how much better it was that I got some bed risers and raised my studio table at home by seven inches or so so that I can work on my art pieces while standing.

You might think a tray like this has little function, but I intend to give it to my sister to replace a fruit bowl I’d made for her years ago that got broken.  It’s good to keep fruit slightly elevated, and exposed to air, so you don’t get those moldy spots underneath it.

This is what most people do with dichroic glass; they cut pieces and assemble them onto a plain background, then cap them to make pretty doohickeys. I’ve seen a lot of jewelry like this. In fact, almost all glass jewelry looks something like this.   I admit, it’s amazingly pretty, but it’s so easy that it feels a little cheap to make this and call it art.

I have not yet drilled holes or glued a finding to make this into a keychain.  I’m not sure if I will.

Here’s what I found about the iridescent glass.  When you put dichro on top of it and fuse it, it doesn’t fuse completely because of the iridescence. This worked in that I was able to put masking tape over it and feel where the outline of the body and thorax were so that I could cut the legs.  But for these, I used plain black glass, and they melted flush.  I tried using clear packing tape as a mask, but it didn’t work because the texture is more like plastic than cloth.

The instructor suggested using lines of glue for the mica pigments. That’s what normal people do when they use mica.  Well, I’d tried that with elmer’s glue and it came out blobby, but another idea was to thin it with water, then put it through a jacquard bottle with a fine tip.  That’s what I did here.  The glue gives a much different texture to the mica pigments.

Belatedly, I was informed that if you have an iridescent or otherwise metallic background, you need to cut the capping glass larger. Yeah, a little late for the top left beetle.

So now I figured out that you have to fuse the dichro to the background glass before you cap it.  Here’s what I also found–when you have iridescent glass in the background, the dichro doesn’t fuse completely flat. That means that even when you fuse it before capping it, you get blisters of air trapped in there.

But I had a new plan.  I decided that having legs behind the bodies wasn’t good enough. I also wanted to have some details on top of the bodies, stripes and thorax lines.  So after they’d been fused, I put masking tape over it and cut out the mask for the legs and antennae, so I could have gold lines on top of the bodies. Here’s the result.

These are more of my dichroic beetles, which I also fused before I realized that they would have blisters of trapped air in them.  Some of them have iridescent glass as a background, which does weird things to the glass on top of it. I’ll explain more in the next post.

I liked my other beetles, but they really needed dichroic class. Dichroic glass looks like beetle’s wings, one of the most beautiful things in nature, and I had to combine them.

First, I made the legs by cutting masking tape, lifting the positive, spraying with hairspray, and dusting it with mica pigments.  When I lifted the rest of the tape, I had some great beetle legs ready for bodies.  Next, I cut the dichro (being as careful not to waste it as I could be–that stuff is expensive!) and carefully glued it on to the mica legs.  Super glue does not stick well to mica pigments, fyi.

Once I’d glued the dichro down, I cut clear sheets of glass to fit and set them on the shelf to be fused.  When I got them out, I found that they had these blisters of air surrounding the bodies.  Yes of course, the instructor said, the air got trapped because the dichro took a while to fuse into the background. You have to fuse the dichro first, then cap it in a second firing.  Great.  Now I knew.