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
Devitrification and other problems, such as staining and foreign bodies, can render your beautiful fused glass cabochon or feature a rather ugly oddity. This has happened to me many times.
My usual approach was to grind or sand away the offending area and then fire polish the pieces. The grinding and sanding can be very tedious and is always time consuming.
After spending a lot of time doing this I became determined to find another option.
Continue reading Tumbling Fused Glass for a Fire Polish
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
Yet another mistake with using Super Spray. This one came about when fire polishing some fused glass cabochons for jewellery sets.
Each set consisted of a single pendant piece and a pair of drops for earrings. When I made them most turned out well, but a few had a little devitrification.
So I decided to grind off the devitrification and fire polish the pieces again.
Continue reading Fixing Staining under 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
This full fuse firing was all about testing a few ideas to make glass cabochons for jewellery. You will notice in the ‘Before’ photo that the items are placed on separate pieces of BullsEye Thinfire kiln shelf paper. For no specific reason other than to use up the paper offcuts.
All glass is BullsEye COE 90. Most glass is 3mm, but there were a few 2mm pieces in some stacks. Everything was fired to a full fuse. The Firing Schedule I used is shown below.
Continue reading Test Cabochons and More
This was a milestone – my very first glass fuse firing.
What’s a glass puddle? Well, I didn’t have the faintest when I first heard the term. It is basically a technique for creating jewellery cabochons.
The idea is to layer up a number of pieces of art glass in complimenting colours, then full fuse that together into a puddle. The glass completely fuses down and melts together into what is literally a puddle of glass.
You then break that up, and that is a challenge, into small pieces, set them on edge and again fire to a full fuse. Other than deciding what colour glass to use and how to layer it up, there is not a lot of control over the final result. I suppose it was this that attracted me to the idea; the mystery of the final result.
Continue reading First Glass Fusing for a Puddle