Glass Trailerwhere stained glass art is made

As much as I enjoy checking out the latest and greatest in glass art, I rarely get a chance to play that much with anything new. Enamels aren’t new but I still never got around to trying them out. A few weeks ago I ordered a sample pack of all different colors. Surprisingly they were somewhat costly for little bags of powder! No wonder I don’t get to try new things that often!

Before I research and try something I like to just figure it out on my own before someone tells me how I’m supposed to do it. Powders are pretty straight forward so I wasn’t really worried on messing up anything.

I started by creating some simple templates. I like stars, so I decided to start there. I cut one big and one small one. The small one is about 1″.

I tried mixing the powder into some Klyr-fire or stringer medium. I accidently dumped a bit too much in so my first attempt (the yellow star on dark glitter green) came out a bit smudgy and oozy. So my second attempt (see red star with orange ring on black below) was to just brush some of the Klyr-fire on the glass and then tap some of the powder on… like confection sugar! That worked much better so I randomly played with colors on some scraps for the remaining two pieces.

Oh and then I found some stringers on my work bench so I piled some of those on a scrap piece of glass too, lol.

Each one had their own issues; this is obviously going to take some practice. For instance, the red star had one of its arms break off as I pulled up the template. I tried putting some more enamel down but in the end it didn’t really help. I’m just learning so I didn’t really care THAT much.

After firing I was surprised just how predictable they turned out. Pretty much exactly what I expected…

And a close up:

Mine all turned out like sidewalk chalk on glass. But, now that I’ve played I can go back and research the best methods and give it another go. I’ve seen some amazing final pieces so I’m hoping I can pick up a thing or two for next time!

I realized today I kind of left everyone hanging.  I had a post a few days ago about watching glass melt in which  I had shoved a pile of scraps into the kiln and melted them down, but I never showed what came of it.

Well, here it is.  I ended up with a really thick slab of glass that was beautifully layered.  It’s hard to see depth without actually holding it yourself but hopefully the pictures give you some idea of the result.

I just finished grinding and cutting it down…. it was really difficult with it being so thick!  I’ll probably place it on a drop ring since I’ve never actually tired one before.