After you put together your work, you are ready to put it in a kiln. You need very high temperature (like 1500 degrees F) in order to melt glass to a point where they can be fused seamlessly. People think a kiln is big, but there are small kilns one can buy, like this one:
After it's fused and cools down, it looks like a bulky piece of glass. If this is for decoration, you might not need to do any further processing. I don't know about you, but I am a practical person and I want my product to be something useful. I would want to slump it into some shape such as a small plate.
Here's a plate that I slumped into the shape of a funny, uniquely shaped dish or ashtray:
I love this step the most. You use sandblaster to take some glass off of your work to make it look rough, and it makes a contrast with the surrounding shiny surface . You first draw your design on this special sheet of paper. I forgot what it's called but it has a hard, sticky, transparent pane on a piece of white paper, and you cut out your design so that sandblasting doesn't affect glass outside of the design. Make sense?
I love to sandblast meaningful Chinese characters on a glass dish I made, and give it to someone as a gift. It is both practical and meaningful, and it is totally unique! Here is one.
This is actually a pretty simple piece. I didn't put any decorations on the glass. I simply cut a square from a sheet of clear glass, and then I smoothed the edges out, and then I slumped it. After it's done, I sandblasted my family name on it.
Here is one I made for my dad:
This is the most difficult piece I did. The white pieces you see have to be cut one by one, and each needs to be smoothed to perfection. The strips between them are made of transparent glass, and they also need to be cut and smoothed individually.
After I slumped it into the shape of a dish, I also sandblasted a beautiful Chinese character on it. Any idea what it means ? It is a character in my dad's name, and it also means all the good things in life!
Here is one I made for my mom:
This piece looks different in its design. I threw on little colored glass pieces before it went in the kiln for fusing. I also used glass sticks to make up a Chinese character, which is a character in my mom's name, and it means "leaf". I sandblasted the same character on the back.
Here is one I made for my friend. Its shape looks special, but I simply picked a mold of that shape to slump it with. The difficult part was to make sure the size of my dish was within a reasonable range so that slumping would be successful. Oh, and I arranged red glass pieces to create a Chinese character as well. This one I am not going to tell you what it means. If you really want to know, you'll find out because when there's a will, there's a way!
Glass fusing is very fun because you can make all kinds of design you want and you can make them practical. The only drawback is that you need several machines to finish your work, especially a glass smoother and a kiln. This alone makes it hard for me to make anything outside class. If I want to make a glass dish or plate for someone, I will definitely come back to class!
After you have a fused product, you can slump it in a mold so that it takes on the shape of that mold. In fact, you don't even need to have a fused product to do this; you can slump one piece of glass if you want. It will be thin and not very interesting.
So the way you slump is to put the fused glass product on a mold. Remember it must fit the mold fairly well; so you must pick the mold from the very beginning and work your way towards now. The glass should be slightly bigger than the mold, so that when it slumps, it comes out to be about the size of the mold. After you put the glass on a mold, you put the whole thing in a kiln, and heat it at 1300-1400 degrees F for as long as it takes for slumping to occur, usually within a couple of hours.
Here's one sample piece I made that takes on the shape of an ashtray by slumping:
Here's another piece which takes on the shape of a funny looking vase by slumping:
After you cut your glass, usually you would want to have smoother edges, or you have a bump somewhere that you want to get rid of. There is a wide array of tools you can use to smooth your glass. Most of them work by rotating a specialized surface with water on it, and you rub your piece against it to make it smooth. There is this machine that runs a thick belt and you rub your piece against it. In general they are easy to use; you just need to put on goggles to prevent little pieces from getting into your eyes!
Decorating your piece is the meat of the whole process. Usually you decorate glass with other pieces of glass, which can be of different color, shape, and so on. There is a wide range of materials such as glass powder and thin glass sticks.
Here's one glass piece I made with many small pieces of colorful glasses sitting on top of a bigger piece of clear glass. I even used red thin glass sticks to write a Chinese character:
You use a glass cutter to cut a glass into any shape you want. It sounds impossible but it's actually quite easy once you get the hang of it. The glass I was using was thin because if it's too thick, cutting it could be a challenge. You usually run your cutter in a straight line, but once you are used to it, you can do irregular shapes such as a circle. As mentioned in the previous section, if you are planning to slump your product in some mold, you need to cut your glass the same shape as that of the mold.
Like any other material, glass comes in different sizes, colors, and types for sale. It comes in full sheet, 1/2 sheet, or 1/4 sheet. Glass itself can be any color, and its type can be standard, standard iridescent, thin, thin iridescent, and so on. I just got some clear, thin glass and some white, thin glass because I didn't want to have too many colors in my work. I live by the motto, "Simpler is better." You actually have to plan ahead before you get your materials. For example if you want to make a small plate of a particular shape, you need to find an appropriate mold as well.
Here is a photo of one piece of white glass, one piece of clear glass, and one thin glass stick (I forgot the technical term for that..).
I'd like to share with you how I took up glass fusing. I took a class in glass fusing with the Adult Ed program of Santa Barbara City College. It was a beginner's course and it taught us the basics of glass fusing. Glass fusing is a process in which you fuse various pieces of glass together to make one beautiful glass piece. Obviously glass fusing is art and sky is the limit when it comes to creativity, but here are the basics:
The whole point is to pick the glass you want, decorate it with other glass, smooth your glass to your satisfaction, and fuse all your pieces of glass together in a kiln. After your piece is done, you can put it in a mold and slump it in the kiln again with much lower temperature so that the glass piece comes out taking the shape of the mold. You can also sandblast some design on your glass. In fact, this is exactly how I made all my products in this class. There are many other ways to process and post-process your products to make them look fancy and stuff, but I choose to be simple and elegant.
