This isn't quite glass, but it's going to be my table FOR my glass, and we don't have a metalwork thread, and I want to share my progress somewhere, so. Spoiler: before, aka this table has been Five Years in the Rain Spoiler: where I stopped for the night because it was getting dark there was a great deal of mad cackling while wielding the grinder. also my arms felt like jelly for like an hour afterwards.
Cleaning up my stuff since I'm going off to school: Shiny dragon hoard: My mom is keeping this kitten until it gets spayed and I tried to pet it and it bit me: It was pretty unambiguously my fault, lol.
ooh, i've been intrigued by glass stuff for a long time, thought about trying to get into it, but kept deciding against it because a) not up to sitting at a workbench for more than 10 mins and b) guilt from other unfinished projects. but the microwave kiln is cheapish, i could derp around with that and not feel guilty. anyone want to give me a rough idea of How Is Happen The Thing? i've also been curious about lamp glass. i'd love to make stitch markers where the glass was fused to the metal pin rather than spinning freely and pinching your yarn.
I haven't done fused glass in ages, others here can probably tell you more and better, but from what I recall, you basically assemble the colored glass bits together collage-ways and then put them in the kiln to fuse together. I believe you can glue your glass pieces in place so they don't jostle, the glue will just burn off in the kiln. There's different temperatures for different kinds of fuse - one temperature will just get the glass hot enough to stick together but like you can still see the relief between what were once separate pieces, a bit higher and the stacked-up glass all squooshes into a single flat piece of glass that's different colors in different areas, higher still and you can get your glass to slump to fill a mold to make a bowl or dished plate or whatever. As for lamp glass, it's actually a good bit of work to keep your beads from sticking to the metal mandrel you make them on. You put a bit of clay slip on the end of the mandrel, so the glass will stick to that and you can break it off the rod and then ream the bulk of the clay out of the bead hole. If that clay breaks, the glass is not coming off the rod short of taking a hammer to it, so you may be able to get something like you're thinking of by asking any beginning glassmakers if they've got beads that won't come off the mandrel that they're willing to part with and then trimming the metal to how you want it? General rule is that hot glass will stick to hot metal. This is part of why glassworkers keep dunking their metal tools in water - if the metal gets too close to the temperature of the glass, the glass will start sticking to it.
@jacktrash what you need for fused glass: a kiln kiln paper (included with microwave kiln if you get the kit) a microwave (probably one you're not ever gonna use for food again - got mine free on craigslist) some glass (irritatingly difficult to ship unless there's a glass store you can drive to, but, ex., the microwave kiln comes with a bunch of little pieces to experiment with) (you CAN use the kind people use for stained glass, but it's less likely to crack or shatter if you use glass designed for fusing, with a standard coefficient of expansion) a glass cutter for scoring glass (microwave kit comes with one of these) running pliers for snapping glass along the scores eye protection? the kit I got came with some heat-protecting knitted gloves which are REALLY helpful for opening the kiln to peek at things how the thing happen: 1) come up with an idea 2) score glass with the glass cutter, then break it with the running pliers, until you have the shapes you want 3) stack the glass pieces on top of each other - glue can be helpful if you're gonna move the whole unit around 4) put it on a piece of kiln paper, in the kiln, and put the kiln (with top) in the microwave 5) microwave for 3-4 minutes 6) ideally, let it sit for 45 minutes to an hour to cool. if you're me, peek in the kiln at the red-hot glass and see if it did what you wanted it to. the glass basically just succumbs to surface tension and gravity, and becomes more rounded and flat the longer you heat it for. 7) once it is cooled, you are done! I often end up sitting at my workbench for hours, but it's a process that I think is theoretically breakable into shorter steps - after all, you don't have to sit around while it's heated or while it cools. Most of my time in the basement is spent staring at my phone and also at pieces of glass in the hopes I will come up with something while my last thing cools. :P .. Oh, and @Wiwaxia described it much more concisely! Yeah that's basically how the thing happen.
GLASS IS GREAT comes in late. And from what I know of stitch markers, Jesse may still want to do/have those done separately? Mandrels are designed to NOT bend easily, stitch markers are little loops that you thread in. (Here's the etsy category for an idea.) I haven't made any progress on my set up because it's been Bitching Hot and also Garage Sale as hell, but I could probably make some nice ones of the doesn't-open variety fairly easily? Loop wire, secure ends with a bit of hot glass, make fancy. I have a bunch of fancy colored wire, too. [Give me a project it helps my motivation]
scuttles us out of the sex toy thread and over to glass thread Most major cities (at least in the US) have at least one glassblowing studio that'll do lessons, if you wanna try your hands at the big stuff. For smaller stuff there's lampworking (which is usually beads, some small vessels and sculpture) or fusing (which a bunch of other people here can talk about better than I).
I'm based in a small town in australia, but I'm totally going to look into it. One thing though - is the equipment as heavy as it looks? The rods in particular? I have trouble lifting things sometimes.
I cannot speak to the big stuff, as I've never used it, but proper blowpipes are mostly hollow! You blow through them, after all. That said, they're intended to counterbalance the weight of potentially a lot of glass on the end. @Wiwaxia is probably the better person to ask.
I haven't used the big stuff either, actually, but my mom has. I can ask her for more details if you want, but from what I've heard her talking about -- Yes, the glass does get pretty heavy, especially with larger gathers. There's some obnoxious machismo in the glassblowing world with dudes fucking swinging their blowpipes around to get the glass to stretch out into a longer gather, but letting gravity do the work for you works just as well. Then when you're doing most of the shaping of the glass, you're resting the blowpipe on a bar kind of thing and rolling it back and forth, not supporting its whole weight. Also the big stuff is never a one-person job like lampworking or fusing - you'll have at least one other person assisting and spotting, although I can't remember the exact division of labor.
I MADE IT HAPPEN. Spoiler: setup I only got three beads done before the rain became threatening enough that I had to stop and I'm pretty sure I scorched them from clear into brown (oops? that's what devardi clear is for anyway right) but I DID THE THING, YOU GUYS.
this is really cool! (so many pretties *0*) i've been tempted to get into glassblowing myself but thought it wasn't feasible, this thread is encouraging me to go see if there's a local studio somewhere that isn't ridiculously out of the way :}
Can't get my bead release to stop cracking. Would appreciate tips (yells for @Wiwaxia ) else instead of a bunch of bead mandrels I am going to be selling a bunch of fancy garden stakes. Which I mean, I'm not opposed to fancy garden stakes, but that was very much Not The Plan.
The big one that i can remember is try to keep the clay out of the direct heat of the flame before it's got glass on it. Like holding it below or just on the bottom edge of the flame while wrapping/"painting" hot glass onto it initially. You may want to flash it through the flame a few times before doing that, i don't recall. You may also be cracking it if you're really smushing the bead glass around and putting torque on the mandrel? Trying to get the coat nice and even on the mandrel will probably help, too.
