Stained Glass, Copper Foil, Mistakes, Help, Advice, Patterns, Designs, Bottles, Splitting, Rings, Granville
Bubbles
You may be surprised to hear that this has been my most challenging project to date. Although I prefer Starburst this one gave me the most problems. When I made Starburst I persuaded my friendly neighbour to make me two of the circular frames, more as an insurance measure than the fact I had anything planned for the second one. If Starburst went well I vaguely considered making a pair but it seemed more interesting somehow to see if I could design a completely contrasting piece.
Starburst is all about refracting sunlight so it was important to me that the new piece sparkled like a diamond when lit by the sun’s rays. I played around with basic shapes made from straight glass such as spokes or crosses but eventually settled on circles hoping that they would sparkle like soap bubbles when outdoors
Starburst is all about refracting sunlight so it was important to me that the new piece sparkled like a diamond when lit by the sun’s rays. I played around with basic shapes made from straight glass such as spokes or crosses but eventually settled on circles hoping that they would sparkle like soap bubbles when outdoors
Bottles and jars seemed the obvious starting point and I investigated all the different ways of slicing a bottle to obtain thin (1” wide) glass circles. I tried cutting them with my electric tile cutter but this left the cut edges scratched and totally negated the effect I was trying to obtain. It soon became apparent that whatever method I used had to involve breaking or fracturing rather than cutting the glass. I tried making a rotating bottle cutter like the ones you can buy but this produced very inconsistent results and the cut edge was not accurate enough for what I needed. I tried marking with a glass cutter and trying to crack the marked bottle with boiling water. Again the edge was far too jagged and 90% of my rings ended up breaking. I even tried a trick I’d read about using a burning string and heat with the same result.
The method I eventually used was to score the bottle using a glass cutter rigged to my workmate vice in such a way that I could spin the bottle along the slightly open workmate jaw. This gave me a fairly accurate line. I then put the bottle on a pile of sand in a small tray which allowed it to spin with with minimum friction whilst I applied intense heat with a small butane torch. Even then I broke perhaps 50% of the bottles I used.
I got my bottles by raiding local bottle banks. Wine bottles and pickle jars gave me the medium and large rings but I had trouble getting anything smaller. I did get hold of a large number of mixer bottles but these proved impossible to break using any of the methods above. I didn’t realise before how much thicker the glass is on a small bottle. After many, many attempts I had to compromise by cutting the smaller rings from the necks of wine bottles with my electric saw. Even then this was difficult. The neck of a bottle is far thicker than the body but at least it gave me the smaller diameter. They’re not perfect though and unfortunately they have a slightly rounded edge which made them difficult to join to the straight mesh pieces.
I was going to use colours in this piece as in Starburst but apart from blue and green glass wine bottles it proved impossible to get hold of red or blue bottles in sufficient quantities. Bear in mind that I am breaking 50% of the bottles I use and that I only get perhaps one or two rings from each bottle due to the heat stress on the glass.
I designed the piece on paper first then worked on small sections at a time to maintain stability as I glued them in place. The circular section along the edges helped to give support as I built up the model making sure to allow each section to dry before setting out on the next.
I did experiment with a few other shapes using the bottles but finally concluded that the simplicity of concentric circles looked best in my case. I’ve photographed a few of the prototypes I made to get let you see just a few of the many possibilities.
I used the same glass adhesive as for Starburst which works well and lasts outdoors but is nasty stuff to work with. This type of adhesive dries to a clear flexible finish which mean that it allows a little movement to cope better with wind and rain. I did have a few doubts about the stability of this particular piece but it’s stood up to the weather for two years now (although I do take it indoors during the bad winter months).