Stained Glass, Copper Foil, Mistakes, Help, Advice, Patterns, Designs, Window, Beamish, Granville
Fused Glass
I think that everyone who does stained glass and copper foil work has a yearning to try fusing glass. Sadly though, unless you have access to a glass kiln via a college or a course, it's an expensive hobby to start. A new kiln and a selection of glass suitable for fusing could cost you in the region of £1000 but there are other ways to start out. As I mentioned many colleges run starter courses, there are alternative albeit smaller types of microwave kilns and (although virtually every book on the subject will recommend you don't) you can experiment by fusing normal glass.
I was incredibly lucky and chanced on a glass kiln via EBay where I found someone fairly local who had mis-advertised their kiln by categorising wrongly and describing it as faulty. The owner had actually been trying to fire pottery in it (which needs a a completely different thing) and therefore believed it to be damaged. OK it needed careful cleaning but incredibly I got it for around £100. So don't despair, there are bargains to be had out there.
I was incredibly lucky and chanced on a glass kiln via EBay where I found someone fairly local who had mis-advertised their kiln by categorising wrongly and describing it as faulty. The owner had actually been trying to fire pottery in it (which needs a a completely different thing) and therefore believed it to be damaged. OK it needed careful cleaning but incredibly I got it for around £100. So don't despair, there are bargains to be had out there.
Fusing glass has a very, very precise coefficient of expansion and it's difficult to mix even different manufacturers colours. When you use a glass kiln there is quite a complex learning curve to programming different types of heating and cooling cycles and you will make mistakes and have breakages. Practice makes perfect and in my mind it's better to experiment with smaller pieces and the cheapest glass possible.
My pleasure in fusing glass is experimentation. I started out by wanting to see just what was possible and hoped to achieve something a bit unusual. I tried bubbles (which are a very specialist skill), I tried using my cheaper stained glass instead of the more expensive fusing glass (and learned that in general they don't mix well together), I even tried melting glass bottles. You can see a few of the results below.
Everything about glass fusing is unpredictable and skill only comes with trial and error. One of the biggest surprises is how glass changes colour when it is fired and you can even buy a product called striker glass which literally changes from one primary colour to another. These were a few test strips I did in my early experiments and you can compare unfired glass pieces which have been glued alongside finished fired equivalents. The other picture shows a before and after photo from the kiln.
I'm limited on size by the surface area within the kiln but I intentionally try not do produce too big a pieces. Our house is fairly small and there's already enough things hanging on the walls! However my wife has a pair of pet runner ducks so I made an exception for her with this one. Because I was trying to be a cheapskate with the glass it does have a couple of faults but nonetheless I was quite pleased with the overall result.