Here’s a fused bottle glass project that you may not have considered. These house numbers are made with fused recycled bottles and Armstrong’s Float Fire frit. This is a relatively easy project, grab a cup of coffee and follow along.
Learning to use bottle glass to produce glass art is a really great idea. Not only because there are a ton of projects that can be made, but it’s fun! Because bottles are relatively abundant, there’s less pressure to be perfect. Being able to start over with minimal expense is a great way to get over the new project jitters and branch out.
Yesterday’s newsletter featured a tech tip about how to make sure your stemware will fuse flat, just in case you were in the mood to fuse a wine glass or martini glass.
An attentive reader (thanks Jeanne!) e-mailed me with questions, so I thought I would expand on the concept for all of you who aren’t subscribed to the newsletter. Which you really should be…right over there in the right sidebar, it’s not painful, really.
Here we go:
I’m starting with two martini glasses, both purchased from the thrift store down the street. This started out as an experiment to see if it was possible to melt a martini glass flat to use for other projects.
One of the martini glasses goes into the kiln whole. The other one is marked and then cut. By cutting off either side of the base, we can make sure the glass won’t roll when it fuses.
Martini glass with a cut base before firing.
There are lots of ways to cut bottles, I’ve tried all of them that I can find and think of, my favorite is still the tile saw. There are pro’s and con’s to using a tile saw, it’s a tool that is great for somethings, not so much for others.
Things to consider:
- It’s FAST! I can cut upwards of 50 bottles an hour with a saw.
- Works great for bottles with surface texture or raised patterns.
- Fairly accurate with practice.
- Leaves a raggedy edge that is really best either cut off, or ground smooth before fusing. I usually cut them off.
- Is pretty darn messy.
- Needs safety gear. I STRONGLY recommend a respirator, safety glasses or face shield and a combination of ear-plugs and gun muffs.
I have an 8″ tile saw, so I roll the bottle into the saw blade as I cut. If you have a larger saw, you can pull the blade through the bottle, I still recommend a slight roll, it will keep your cut smooth and keep the last little bit from breaking.
Once you get the neck and the bottom cut from the bottle, you’ll have a cylinder of glass that is the start point for lots of other projects.
Here is a short video showing how to cut the bottom from a Crown Royal bottle.
More information about things to do with bottles!
I want my bottle glass all hot and melty!
In just two weeks I will be starting a project that I’ve never done before. I have been offered the Artist in Residency at Hawthorne Elementary in Salt Lake City. The school has 250 kids, grades K-6. I usually teach just one class of kids at a time, so expanding to include 7 classes of varying age and ability of kids has been very exciting.
The theme of the residency is Using Glass Art to tell the Story of YOU. Each of the four projects that we will be doing will tell some part of what is unique about each persons life. Three of the projects will be recycled glass, one will be fused art glass.
Recently on on my facebook page, there was a question about how to flatten bottles enough to use in a kiln carving project. The short answer is: You don’t have too. The long answer is more easily explained with some photo’s and instructions. The cool thing is, this works for texture tiles too. (more…)
Recently we reviewed a couple of ways to use stacked and tack fused layers of recycled glass to create visual interest in our artwork without the use of color.
You can use this same stacking technique fired to a full fuse to great, but different, effect. This is a useful trick to have in your book. Ready? Here we go.
Geometry 2
Last week we talked about stacking and tack fusing recycled glass and using negative space as part of the design element. Hopefully that post gave everyone lots of great ideas and you all spent the weekend creating like crazy.
Tack fusing is also really handy when you decide to use additional bits of glass AS the design. We are still working with window glass (float and/or plate) without color, so we need to figure out how to use that to our advantage rather than rely strictly on just throwing more colors into the mix. (more…)
Happy St. Patrick’s day! In honor of my family heritage (you did see the McRaney up there, didn’t you?), here is the free kiln carving pattern for March. This pattern is slightly more difficult to cut than the pattern for January, but still quite straightforward.
1. Cut a piece of fiber paper big enough for the pattern.
I used 1/32″ fiber paper for this particular project. Tack the pattern over the fiber paper through the black tack dots.
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When creating glass artwork with recycled glass, color play often isn’t an option. By stacking and tack fusing, you can create visual interest. Using ‘white space’ in conjunction to ‘stack and tack’ gives you a huge variety of options.
For example:
"Space Between"
This piece is a large circular vessel. After cutting the circle, a 1″ wide strip was removed from the inside (drawing a square within the circle). Then squares of the same sheet of float glass were stacked over the gap and tack fused.
