Leaving A Paw Print on Our Hearts

[Mike]

I've started working on a glass design that takes to heart the often said comment about how our Bouviers (and other dogs and animals) leave a big paw print on our hearts. I've seen it done in jewlery but I wanted to do something a bit bigger. So I did a test run using some 7x9 sheets of glass and ground up glass frit along with a heart shaped cookie cutter mold.

To start off, after cutting the clear glass that was to be the base, was put strips of fiber paper around the edges and hold them in place with fire bricks and kiln posts. This way I didn't have to worry about the strips moving and I could cover the glass with frit evenly from edge to edge without it falling off.

I laid the base glass down and put the fiber paper strips around the edges. I then placed the heart cookie cutter mold in the middle and put a layer of Pimento Red coarse sized frit (about 1/8" and less in size chunks of ground glass). The stainless steel cookie cutter was not perfectly flat along the edges so I pressed down on it while I put in the bulk of the frit I was using for the heart. This sorta kept it from sliding out from underneath (although it wasn't completely successful). While still pressing down on the heart mold, I poured in the coarse French Vanilla that I used to surround the heart. Once I had a good layer around it, I removed my hand from the mold. Then I added on top of that fine sized (sand grain size) frit to fill in the gaps between the larger coarse frit.

This is how it looked before I turned on the kiln...



and a close up:



I heaped up the red on the heart in hopes that it will be slightly rounded, but it did flatten out a bit during the fusing.

The first thing I noticed when I took it out of the kiln was that I should have either taken the processing temp up a bit more (I used 1485) or used a longer hold (I held for 15 minutes at 1485). A longer hold would have been my choice and it would have let the bits of glass flow and join with the other bits a bit more. The heart looks smoother because I put more fine sized frit on it when I heaped it up a bit. The heart did come out a bit rounded from the rest of the plate, which is what I wanted. Here is a picture of the front...



This shows the coarse look of the larger French Vanilla frit and you can just see the coarse red frit underneath where the fine frit smoothed out.

Here is a picture of the side that was facing the kiln washed shelf...



The heart is more defined (although there is a bit of frit crawl of the red into the French Vanilla area) but it is also evenly flat across the whole sheet.

At this point I had a couple of choices. I could fire it again to smooth out the top, maybe adding more frit to the heart to keep it 3D looking or I can do a flip and fuse and bring the bottom to the top, fire polishing it at the same time as flattening the top (which is now the bottom. I decided to go with a fuse with the top facing up and a longer hold time at the top 1485 temp.

Staying at the fusing temp (1485) for twice as long did flatten the top out and I lost the roundness of the heart like I figured I would, but I also didn't get the merging of the individual pieces of frit of the larger pieces. It still looks like a very smooth verson of curdled milk or small curd cottage cheese.

Next time I will cover the coarse frit with fine sized frit so it will look more solidly fused. The bottom still looks like it did before.

Here is the picture I took of it...



The paw print I put on with a paw print stencil I have. Even though the black powder frit was piled up, it still shrunk down enough to look thin after fusing. I'm going to try putting it on there a different way next time.

I'm already working on another one to try and use what I learned with this one to make a better one. And I have some ideas to try in doing that.

Mike