Glassing

[fub]

My sister has been making glass art for a few years now. She has three ovens (one of which is in their vacation home) and has been making all kinds of things: sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract, sometimes purely decorative but also things like trays and vases.

She was coming to the Netherlands for over the Easter break, and she brought the smallest oven and some of her supplies. We went there on the Monday to work on some projects!

The material to work with



She has worked out a technique to make ‘murini’, small rods of glass with a pattern. These can be used to make things like ‘millefiori’ (literally: thousand flowers), something that Murini, the glass-makers island of Venice is famous for.

I had thought long and hard on what to make, and I decided on making a little Estus flask, from Dark Souls. It’s the healing item, and it’s a flask filled with a yellow and red glowing liquid. My sister cut out a flask shape out of transparent glass, and I would put all kinds of dots and smaller pieces of glass on there. By baking it really hot, I’d get a ‘full fuse’ and get a single sheet of glass with all those colors in. Then on a second firing, the flask shape would be made round so that you could set it upright.



I’d pick up a dot and glue it in place with a tiny, tiny bit of hobby glue — that would burn off in the oven anyway, but the important thing was that it would keep in place when handling the unfired item.



Work in progress.



It requires a bit of concentration, but I got the routine down. We had some smaller pieces of glass left, and we made a few ‘dots plates’ and other items too.



Some of the other items we made that day.



It’s kinda weird to have a thing that gets to 800 degrees Celcius on your living room floor, but the oven is quite well insulated so it doesn’t get stupidly hot outside. Firing the glass takes about 24 hours.



My Estus flask after the first firing. Apparently there is a spot that got ‘devitrified’, and my sister didn’t have the tools with her to rectify that, so the item is now in Denmark for that. There will be a second firing to make it round, too.

I like how it looks, but I think I should have used a lot less green and blue. But maybe there will be a second one in the future…



One of the little ‘dots plates’ we made. I like how it’s a little colourful mosaic, but since it was fired on ‘full fuse’, it’s all smooth.

It was a lot of fun. Perhaps, when we visit Denmark in the future, we’ll do more of it.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.