Glass Fusing 3

OK folks, another week, another glass dish. This time, we made round ones. This involves a new tool! One specifically for cutting glass circles. It's basically a brass rod with a hinged suction cup on one end, and a sliding cutter head that you can move up and down the rod. Sucker the cup to the middle of your glass sheet, then you can trace out the circle precisely all the way round. You need to flip the glass over and press down at the corners (assuming you started with a square) to turn the score into a crack that penetrates the thickness of the glass. Then you run some score lines from the circle to the outside, and use the running pliers to break the glass. If all is well, the edges should pretty much fall off and you should get a nice circle. In practise, it's a bit fiddly, and half the time the glass doesn't want to crack nicely. But there you go.

So I cut myself a piece of clear glass for the base, and several pieces of different glass for the top. I used one of the iridescent glasses this time; always wanted to use this stuff so here we go. Here it is assembled. I put some amber coloured stringers (the thin glass rods) over the larger pieces of black glass to break it up a bit.

These are some of the pieces (mine's on the right) in the large kiln. You can see this has a flat floor; the pieces get fully fused as flat discs before they're put into moulds.

And here is the finished article. Shiny, eh? The amber stringers didn't show up as much as I was expecting, but that's OK, this class is about experimentation as much as anything. I'm pretty pleased with it overall.