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

[Mike]

Last night I used a heart shaped cake mold (aluminum pan type) and did a freeze and fuse heart to make a waffer. This gives me a well defined heart shape that doesn't have the small curd cottege cheese look to it like my other one did. I didn't have a lot of Pimento Red like I've been using, so I tried Deep Red Opal. It is a lot darker red than the Pimento Red is, so I probably won't use it except for testing out the waffer idea. I might try mixing the Deep red with clear or white to thin it out a bit at another time.

The heart did come out the way I was hoping though. Nice and defined and smooth around the edges. The top still has some of the marks from the aluminum handle I used to tap it down, but that will smoth out when I take it to fusing temps later. Or I might do a flip and fuse to flatten the top down. The bottom is nice and flat but it picked up some texture from the cake mold I used and I don't want to have to get that out first.

As I was just finishing with the heart and getting ready to put it in the freezer, I came up with another idea that I would have tried with the FnF heart had I thought of it before I had it all filled. So while it was chilling, I made another heart using the same cookie cutter mold I used in the first post above. What I did this time was use it to cut out (cookie style) a heart in a peice of 1/8" fiber paper. I then put this on my kiln shelf so it wouldn't have to be moved after I filled it with the frit.

I then took the piece with the heart cut out and put a paw that I'd cut out of fiber paper (fiber paper is made up of material that takes a lot higher temp than what is used to fuse glass, so it doesn't burn or stick to the glass) back on another project and still had sitting around. The pads are made up of individual pieces of fiber paper so I placed them inside the heart shape. I then sprinkled a layer of Pimento Red fine frit over all of it so it was heaped up above the edge of the fiber paper. Then, after the FnF heart was frozen, I popped it out on the shelf next to the frit version and ran them through my FnF schedule last night. The temp for the FnF is actually about 65 degrees lower than what I use for fusing frit that isn't frozen, but it did a good tack fuse of all the frit, which is what I was after. It will be fully fused to another piece of glass later.

When I got home from work this morning, I pulled it out so I could turn it over and look at the fiber paper pads and see how it turned out. It came out great. I'm really impressed with the well defined paw print in the middle of this frit heart. What I will do is fill the indentions with black frit, lay the heart on a sheet of glass (probably a sheet of clear with a layer of frit on top) and do a full fuse to fuse it all together and polish it up.

I also got in my latest order of candy and soap molds today. I have several paw print molds that I will use to make FnF paw waffers to lay on the hearts and other non-heart shapped glass. I've got several different sizes to play with. I think I need to make another run to Bulls Eye this weekend and get more frit for all of this.

I didn't take pictures of the above last night but I did take pictures afterwards this afternoon and before I put the paw print heart back in to fuse tonight.

Here is the Deep Red heart I did in the cake pan mold. This is the top and shows the marks from the aluminum handle I used to tap it down. That will all smooth out when I fuse it. The red is a bit deep for a nice heart though.




This is the heart that I put the Pimento Red all over the fiber paper paw. The fiber paper didn't stick to the frit and after I pulled it out, I had this nice clean impression.




Here is the heart with black frit in the paw impression. It is sitting on a 7x9 sheet of Bullseye Tekta clear with a layer of coarse French Vanilla, fine French Vanilla and powder French Vanilla. I ran out of fine so I sprinkled the powder on to fill a few gaps. I really need to make another run to Bullseye.



We'll see how it turns out when I get home tomorrow.

Mike

[Mike]

I got home this afternoon and took a look at how the above heart plate came out. It did pretty good. The French Vanilla frit smoothed out nicely and the heart fused to that. I have to grind the edges to take out some little jagged glass (fiber paper, which I had around the edges to keep the frit on the sheet of glass, will cause jagged points) and I'll fire polish it again to smooth everything out.

Here is a picture of the heart plate after this session:



I think the paw is too big, but I can make it smaller in others. I'll work with different sizes and see what looks the best. But I think for a test, it's coming out pretty good. I'll take what I'm learning from these and hopefully improve the next ones I make. One thing I'm going to do is add some wire so they can be hung. The plate is a little heavy to hang from a suction cup type hook, but would be ok from a screw hook of some kind. I am going to try and do a few without the layer of frit and just use a colored piece of glass underneath for the heart to rest on. I just need to try a few colors to see what goes best with it.

Mike