Making Green Puddle Cabochons – Part 1 – The Puddle

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Time for a new fused glass puddle.

In our efforts to build up our stock of cabochons for our first craft market stall (I will post about this later), I decided to make some more striped puddle cabochons. Much like others I made some time ago, but with a green colour scheme.

A while ago I tried my first puddle cabochons, with mixed success. The puddle, though small, worked well, but I had a lot of devitrification when making the cabochons. A lot of time was spent at the glass grinder, grinding and cleaning off devitrification, reshaping the cabochons and fire polishing to get a better result. Some of those cabochons were reworked a few times before I was happy with the result.

It was a big learning experience but now I feel I have moved forward and have enough experience to get a much better and quicker result.

So into the fray I leapt, fearless and ready to commit a lot of glass. This puddle wasn’t going to be like the smaller ones I made previously. This one was going to be a reasonably side. The size I chose, partly due to the glass I had, was about 150mm x 140mm.

First step was, of course, to choose the glass I wanted to use. My choice of green was mainly because I love the look of  malachite. If you are not familiar with malachite, do a search on Google. It is quite amazing. Anyway, I didn’t expect to duplicate this, but if I could achieve a look similar to a semi-precious gemstone I would be pleased.

Here is the list of Bullseye fusible glass I finally decided on, in the order I stacked them bottom to top –

1. 0145 – Jade (3mm)
2. 1107 Transparent Green (3mm)
3. 0113 White (2mm)
4. 0112 Opal Light Green (2mm)
5. 0145 Jade (3mm)
6. 1112 Adventurine (2mm)
7. 0113 White (2mm)

I used only 2mm white as I didn’t want the white to dominate. The order was simply to try and emulate the look of gemstone, with random opaque and transparent sections.

All the pieces were carefully cleaned and stacked, without glue. As you can see in the photo this resulted in a substantial stack of glass, around 18-19 mm thick.

As I wanted the glass to flow and thin out, I did not use any dams. The stack was simply placed on a large piece of Bullseye Thinfire kiln paper. The piece had a border of 60mm around the stack to allow for the flow. I did have a little concern about the glass flow pushing the paper away from the shelf and then sticking to the shelf, but hey, I was fearless remember.

The firing schedule I used is below. You can see I waited longer in Strain Release segment to give the mass of glass time to heat through evenly, then also spent longer in the processing and annealing segments. As stated earlier, all glass is Bullseye COE 90.

The resulting puddle looked great. It didn’t spread as far as I expected, but having the wide border in paper is better than finding the glass stuck to the shelf.

My fear about it pushing the paper as it flowed out was correct, but fortunately it didn’t stick to the shelf.

You can see in the photos the end result. The bottom is more colourful, only because I started the stack with jade green. The grid in the photo is just a craft cutting board I use for cutting kiln paper, fibreboard etc.

In Part 2 I will cover breaking up the glass, a task in itself, preparation of the pieces, the fusing and final stages through to finished cabochons.

Firing Schedule

Full Fuse – Full Fuse puddle for cabochons Bullseye COE 90

Please be aware that all kilns fire differently and this schedule may not produce the same results in your kiln.

Segment	Rate (C/hr)	Target (C)	Hold (mns)
1. Strain Release	222	537	30
2. Process	250	780	30
Crash Cool	Open Door	550	0
3. Anneal	Full	516	60
4. Cool	83	371	30