Fused Glass Firings with Broken Bottles

I've seen so many plates, bowls, even crosses, made using broken bottle glass and have wanted to try it for a long time. My friend recently gave me a few pretty light green Pellegrini water bottles and they are perfect for this project. Here is my first attempt. I remembered that bottle glass needs a higher firing temperature after doing wine bottle rings a year ago. It took forever for the sharp edges to soften. I had a few notes and fired this broken bottle piece to 1520 deg. F. It fired perfectly except for the lower left edge where the glass needs a little reenforcement.

This morning I added a few pieces of glass to that corner. I also did two more bottles. There's no easy way to do this, unless you want to glue each piece together! My first piece turned out to be a 7" square, so I cut fiber paper a little larger. I started with the edges and here is my original piece on the top with my second one underway.

You can see by my third piece on the right that the broken glass pieces got a little larger. Ha. Actually the larger pieces were harder to control than the smaller ones. Just one little slip of the finger topples an area that you've done. This takes a lot of patience. I was not feeling patient. And it was already hot as blazes in the garage so that did not help. But the pieces looked good when I started the kiln, and will keep my fingers crossed that they fire perfectly. Will post a photo tomorrow of the results.