Work has been underway for the recycled glass tree mosaic for about a month now. Mitch and Victor have been hard at work smashing and crushing the beer bottles which will make up the tree section. We had been waiting quite a while to get the templates back from the laser cutting crew, so that I could start creating the tile pieces in the kiln.
I received my first installment of templates this week: the leaves.
Each template is cast with crushed wine bottle glass of varying color. I've been doing a bit of experimentation, and despite what I've read can't be done by mixing colored bottle glass - it seems to be working. Granted, a lot of the glass is crushed to virtually powder so that may have something to do with the coefficients working together since with recycled bottle glass the coefficients are unknown. I'm sure I will have some failures at some point, but for now I'm riding the wave of success......
In the first fire, the glass leaves turned out well overall. However, I found that every tile will need a second firing because there are small gaps and the form changes slightly with settling/fusing. No big deal, but it does add a little bit of extra time to an already tight schedule.
For the second firing, I've added more glass to the vacant areas and other spots. I'll know how it all turned out in another 24 hours.
No comments:
Post a Comment