Finishing the Fused Glass Bowl

Erwin Timmers: Hello, I am Erwin Timmers and we're here at the Washington Glass School, and in this segment we're going to see how the glass came out of the kiln and the perspiring and determine what sort of shape we're not to turn the fused glass bowl into.

I've just taken the glass out of the kiln and this is the final result. As you see it's all one piece of glass now, it's all melted in together and the edges are quite smooth and nice, so I don't even need to use my grinding stone which is up on the phase where you would use something like this. If there's a little sharp point here, something we can just grind this up with the stone, so it doesn't cut you. Now the interesting thing that happened in this bowl is that the glass changed color while it was in the kiln and this happens with a lot of colors, reds are particularly prone to it.

Sometimes you'll be forewarned by the manufacturer, sometimes not. But as you can see the color that I use to create the top part of the two is very different now than what it was. This is called the striker color basically when it's reheated, it will change color. It's a little bit tricky to deal with sometimes because you can't see the final results before you take it out of the kiln and what helps sometimes if you have a piece of glass, look at it from the side and then you can sometimes see a different color as you're looking through the side of the glass, that would be an indication that this would be a striker color.

The other colors didn't change too much, see here the plum at the bottom. This one also changed a little bit, now became a little bit more opaque, now it's a little bit of a different color. So here's my number two. Now, at this phase you can say Okay, I want to keep this as a tile, there is various methods for hanging these and various ways of incorporating it into a transom or something like that. You can also decide Okay, I am going to go onto making the bowl. This requires the whole second step in introducing it into the kiln, heating it up. We've talked about the temperature is going to be a little bit lower. Since, you basically only want the glass to take on the shape of whatever molds you have it on. So for this case it would be about 1250 degrees.

Now this is the mold I have selected and look it fits perfectly. This is where I made a six inch square in the first place. There's lots of different molds. This is the ceramic mold that you can get from various glass supply houses. You can also make molds yourself. I take a slab of clay and shape into whatever shape I wanted to. I make a lot of lighting and sconces. This is a sconce mold that I made actually by cutting out a traffic cone cutting it in half and laying the clay over that one. But any free form can work too, we've also got these fiber products that actually originally intended for boilers, that sort of equipments, not really meant for glass but usable by glass people.

You can cut out shapes and it holds a zone in the heat of the kiln and your glass will just take on whatever shape it was on. Also stainless steel, this is a huge one that we have for making things and the sink mold does need to be coated also in the same way as we've coated the shelf before because otherwise the stainless steel will stick to the glass and you won't have a successful end product.

I'll show you now through the beauty of video we've got the end product here where you see this is how it came out of the kiln. The colors don't change much in the second firing just because it's already done this job in the first firing but here's the little ball, oops, I have my finger prints all over it and happy birthday Kiara! happy two years old and that was it for today. I hope you enjoyed the video, I hope you've learned something new about fusing a glass bowl and that's it.