Two Bowls

Here's a couple of round designs, in the kiln and ready to be fused. They are sitting on Thinfire paper, which is a ceramic-infused paper that gives a nice surface on glass, and doesn't stick to the glass like kiln wash does. I've weighted down the corners with some firebrick offcuts from Alan's oven.

Eight hours of fusing later, we have two nice smooth glass discs!

Now, it is time to try slumping some glass. I purchased some slumping moulds from Bonny Doon in California. They are bottomless, so the bases of the pieces will always be flat. And I just liked the cute small sizes of these bowls - 5,6 and 7 inches in diameter. The steel ring is a casting mould; of which, more later...

The two blanks were both 6" in diameter, so I used the two larger moulds. It doesn't matter if you don't fill a mould completely but you just can't let glass slump over the edge, if it's too wide.

I set the kiln to a slumping cycle, up to 1230F and hold for 10 minutes. I peeked inside at the end of the hold to make sure the glass had gone all the way to the bottom of the moulds, and it had, so I did not need to extend the hold. This morning, all was cool again, and this is what I found:

I took the bowls out of the moulds, washed off the residual dust and here we are!:

A closer look

So there we go; my first actual proper pieces, made in my own kiln.