The Weekend Project

I took this photo of what I've been working on this weekend, right before I put it in the kiln. This is my new design for a bowl. I'm trying one of the techniques I learned in the Patty Gray class I took in November of last year.

For this piece, I cut strips of glass and laid them on the 'side' rather than flat. This gives a different view and effect. I alternated two strips of a blue/clear streaky with one strip of clear glass.

Yesterday I was struggling with glass colors and designs. I started on this yesterday afternoon and after some re-working, this is the final design. I'm trying lots of new things with this piece. The most obvious is laying the cut glass strips on their sides. It proved rather challenging to cut them to be the right size as I was laying this in place. I had to re-work things a couple of time.

The other new approach is I have added copper screen inclusions. The photo only shows three copper inclusions well, but there are 4 (I know that digresses from the three point artistic approach). The fourth inclusion is in the lower right section of the circle and is hard to see because it is small and the flash obscured it. They are sandwiched between two layers of clear glass, top and bottom. It will be interesting to see how this copper reacts to the fusing process. It is my understanding that the copper should take on a rusty, red appearance, but after all I have read about copper inclusions, nothing would surprise me color wise...it could turn blue, or even black (I hope it doesn't turn black, but who knows, maybe I'd like that????).

I just hope that this turns out well and all of my time and effort creating the foundation for this bowl won't go to waste. The firing schedule is extra long because of the thickness; it's about 3/8" deep. I have cold working in front of me if this turns out successful, as that will allow me to finish the edges and make sure I have a nice circle for slumping it into the bowl shape. I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out....that moment when you open the lid of the kiln and go "Great!" or "Back to the drawing board".