Tracy Cooper on fri 20 aug 04
I was looking through the archives and came across this subject and thought I'd add my experiences in. I first fired pieces of broken glass(just regular window glass, not leaded) several years back while doing some platters, I was thrilled with the way it flowed down and pooled into the base and formed a layer of glass that picked up the oxides underneath. The crazing was quite exciting too, crackles run every which way and were really pretty to look at. The surface was always solid and smooth though.
Recently when I was doing a platter on commission I had a toss away platter that I thought was ruined so I decided to revive the glass idea and placed shards in the center to refire it, overlapping up onto the sides. The next day, after a cone 6 firing, I pulled out a real gem of a platter, one that has glass flowing down the sides with traces of green underneath where the copper wash had been, in the center was a solid pool of glass, all crackled and very nice to peer at. The interesting thing is you can see through the glass and at it at the same time, great depth and the crackles give it the appearance of diamonds. It did have several volcanos and craters but it was non functional anyway so it didn't bother me, strictly a wall platter.
THis platter intrigued me so I did another large one with glass in the center and wound up with basically what is a sunburst where the long shards melted and flowed down into the center. I learned that by carefully placing the pieces you could control the shape that would be there after melting. For instance: if the shard is square it will leave a square outline when it melts, if pointy it will be pointy and so on. Sometimes it will slough off and make the outline less distinct but usually it can be counted on to retain the shape. I really like my sunburst platters and the unusual effects of clay and glass together.
I also learned by carefully applying a thin oxide wash you could, to an extent, cause a green glass melt or blue or whatever. Obviously the more oxide the deeper the color, I preferred the thinner and lighter application.
I never had a prob with the glass shiverring off or flaking in any way, even the old platters from years ago still have that solid mass of glass without any additional surface cracking. AS a decorative device I think it's fun to play with just make sure you melt glass into a shape where it can't run out or it will make a mess. And did you know molten glass will positively eat soft brick? Yes it will(admits to finding out the hard way). Do it in bowls or platters or anywhere it can be contained and you'll be fine. I would NOT do this for food safe ware however because of the underlying oxides, I know leaching can happen with glass and I would not sell anything as food safe with glass in the interior. Plus once you melt glass into it it's heavy. Also because the glass does not always just melt pretty and flat you may have craters and volcanos and pinholing so you don't want anyone using that for moist food, there can also be glass boogers that are sharp so keep it dec
orative.(any glass sticking up can be easily ground off or dealt with so you don't cut yoursefl handling it).
Please direct any comments offline as I have turned off my clayart email for awhile.
Have a good day!
Tracy~
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