Hey, what do you expect from Rocketman? OK, a cheeseboard is a bit of an anti-climax, but my rockets are in being serviced.
So, until I get my rockets back, I thought I would make a fused glass cheeseboard. Nothing too demanding, but just a little artistic. You could also use it as a small cutting board, a fruit platter and so on.
So here is how it came about.
Continue reading Rocket & Solar System Cheeseboard – ‘Dying of the Light’
Yes, I know, ‘sort of’ doesn’t sound too great but this simple project came out of the blue. It really wasn’t planned.
It came about when I looked at a 200mm squarish piece of 6 mm clear Bullseye glass and considered trying to cut it. My previous attempt at cutting 6mm glass didn’t exactly work – it cracked in the wrong place. I need a little practice on that one, so I was a little unsure about cutting it.
Anyway, inspiration hit and I could see a nice cheese board in the square, without cutting. Something simple in design I thought. So undaunted I dived in.
Continue reading Making a Square Cheese Board, Sort Of
In Part 1 I covered making the puddle by fusing several sheets of Bullseye COE 90 glass, but didn’t get into how that became finished cabochons.
In this part I will cover making the cabochons from the puddle, from breaking up the puddle, grinding on a glass grinder and preparation, full fusing and a final fire polish.
Continue reading Making Green Puddle Cabochons – Part 2 – The Cabochons
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.
Continue reading Making Green Puddle Cabochons – Part 1 – The Puddle
Believe it or not, up till now I have not made any dichroic cabochons. Yes, they are popular, but I really wanted to explore making cabochons with plain colours first. Getting glitz from dichroic seemed too easy so I waited for a while before giving it a go.
Anyway, finally I decided to make a dichroic slab to cut up into cabochons.
Continue reading Dichroic Slab for Cabochons
In the first part I talked about how I managed to fuse up a slab from black and whites offcuts of glass.
In this post I will continue with details about cutting the slab into cabochons, grinding the edges and then the final fire polishing of the cabochons.
Continue reading Making Fused Glass Zebra Cabochons – Part 2
Well, that’s what I like to call them. They are black and white fused glass cabochons with a sort of stripe appearance, so ‘Zebra’ seemed like a good idea.
These came out of me looking at a lot of black and white glass offcuts and wondering what I could do with them. Stacking them into individual cabochons was an obvious solution, but I was looking for something a little different.
If I could do a pot melt that would have been another idea, but I’m not so confident with that.
I decided on trying to achieve a random stripe, a little like zebras. The problem was, how do I achieve this result.
Continue reading Making Fused Glass Zebra Cabochons – Part 1
All kilns, as far as I know, have cool spots. Areas in the kiln that never reach the desired temperature. The result is that anything in those areas will not be processed to the same degree as the rest of the kiln.
After many firings I knew this to be the case in my kiln, but wasn’t sure just where those areas were.
A recent fire polish gave me the opportunity to look at this a little better.
Continue reading Cool Spots in Your Glass Kiln
Just out of curiosity, I was wondering how hard it would be to make striped round cabochons. Nothing fancy, just small round cabs in striped colours.
My thought was to simply layer up a few small strips of glass and full fuse to round cabochons. Well, that’s exactly what I did and this is how it turned out.
Continue reading Making Small Striped Cabochons
One of the simplest fused glass items to make has got to be simple round glass cabochons. Well, that’s what I thought, but there is a catch, or two.
Small round cabochons are great for making things like stud earrings and for embellishing other creations. In the past I have successfully made these without any real problem, using transparent glass. But now I wanted to make some using opalescent glass. My research told me that Bullseye opalescent glass does have a tendency to pick up shelf separator and kiln paper if fired at a high temp, such as a full fuse. But I had to try.
Continue reading Making Small Simple Cabochons
In one of my attempts to fix devitrification on some of my fused glass cabochons I made a mistake. As a result of that I found myself trying yet again to rescue these cabochons.
So what was the mistake? It was to cover ground cabochons with Fuse Master Super Spray anti-devitrification solution. The result was the encasing of what appeared to be grind marks below what is otherwise a wonderful polished surface. I expected the glass to all fuse together and obliterate the grind marks, but I suspect the marks were simply too deep and minute air bubbles were trapped below the surface.
So now I find myself trying again to remove not devitrification, but those encased grind marks.
Continue reading Fixing a Mistake with Super Spray
Recently, I tried an offcut puddle. A stack of Bullseye 90 COE glass offcuts were piled up on a shelf and fused until they melted down in to a puddle. This worked quite well, but a few pieces of opalescent offcuts did show signs of devitrification.
In the same firing Ann made a bar of black and white using multiple stringers for decoration.
Out intention was always to then cut the puddle and bar up for cabochons. Well, I recently received a new diamond blade for my tile cutter and really wanted to give it a try, so cutting the puddle up was the perfect test.
Continue reading Offcut Puddle Cabochons Fire Polish