Wednesday, August 28, 2013

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.


11 comments:

  1. I cant wait to see the results - always wanted to do that

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  2. Is it possible to fuse most broken bottles?

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  3. As far as I know you can. But, most importantly, you cannot combined the glass together from different bottles. The COE of each bottle may be different and combining the glass will probably result in cracking. Have fun.....hope you will share your results with me!

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    1. Si me.ha pasado,ahora que lo.diced me.hace sentido¡!!

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  4. Hello, what material is that under the glas?

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  5. Hi RoseMary, I am a fused glass enthusiast also. I have fused different bottles together and reinforced them with clear resin. I find that fusing broken glass together even from the same bottle cracks, especially when I slump it after the initial fusing process. I use an old ceramic kiln so my control of temperature is limited to the cones that I use. If you have any hints I would love them. I use exclusively recycled bottles in all my projects.

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  6. It's in point of fact a nice and useful piece of info. I am happy that you shared this helpful info with us. Please keep us informed like this. Thank you for sharing.

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  7. is it possible to make a little flat glas usable in stain glass about 3inchby 3 inch or so just to have a very special glass in my stain glass work and what kind of oven you need for this is a mycrowave oven can do that whit a klin

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  8. You usually need a special kind of glass to use with a microwave kiln, and since those aren't annealed, they're more likely to break. RoseMary mentioned how long it took for the edges to soften, so it's unlikely this would work with bottle glass. I haven't tried it though.

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  9. Very interesting-I once made a cross using wine bottle glass

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