I am a natural born recycler and I love to play with glass. Glass is very easy to recycle so long as you keep glasses of different C.O.E.s separate. And when you do lamp working, you always lose a few beads. Instead of throwing the glass away, I usually separate in into similar colors much as people save scraps of polymer clay and then I pound it into frit with my home made frit maker. See a tutorial on how to make one here. I bought some glass casting molds from Delphi Glass more than a year ago and finally got to try them out a couple of weeks ago. Needless to say this is a whole new technique for me because casting and fusing use different skill sets. I have been trying various firing schedules to see which work best and have been reading about the best way to prepare my glass for the molds. The glass pieces you see in the molds here are too big. When they melt, they won’t fill the mold and I will get sharp pointy edges because that’s how glass cooyls when there’s not enough of it. Which means I get to cast the pieces again adding more glass to the mold cavities and breathlessly waiting to see what I get. I am learning how to cast fat, happy baubles and how to sand off rough edges and fire polish the glass.
Here are some of my first completed cast pieces (above). I have a long way to go. Everything in the post is made from Moretti glass, dichroic and clear Moretti and broken or rejected (ugly) Moretti beads. When casting or fusing old beads, you have to clean every bit of the bead release out of the holes or it will show up in the cast or fused piece.
Here are some fused pieces. Most of these have been fired at least two and sometimes three times. You don’t always get it right the first time, but you can cut glass, reassemble it and fire it again.
Two sides of one bead with a piece of dichroic on top and clear glass over all.
This was cast in a mold and I added millefiore and some dichroic and clear glass on top of the frit
Parts of this bead had swirls and dots on it.
This was a hollow bead of silvered ivory and cobalt glass. The hole of the bead was that little bubble in the middle of the blue.
Here is some more silvered ivory glass. See how the clear layer on the left piece magnifies what’s underneath?
Ornamento 