Kiln Wash and Fibre Blankets

So, the big flatbed kiln we have uses fibre blanket on it's floor, which can be fired directly on top of, seemingly. It seems to work great that way for low-temperature firings with float glass, but it's not so happy with Bullseye, and I hate the texture that it leaves. It is quite fragile and tears quite easily, and I have a personal dislike for the texture that it leaves on the back of the glass, which I find to feel something like the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard. Jeff Sarmiento was in last week, and suggested that we kiln wash the blanket, which, considering that the blanket was in bad enough shape that we were needing to replace it soon anyways, seemed like a good thing to experiment with. So, I painted a couple of litres of bat wash into it with a Haike Brush.

That involved more dabbing than brushing, since brushing the wash on made the blanket peel away and such, as you can see above.

We pre-fired the newly washed blanket, and then a full fuse of program was run with float glass, and some stained glass glass. The clears released very well, and look just like they would with a kiln shelf, 

Colour, or at least this blue, on the other hand, stuck to the wash, and the blanket, and pulled away a ton of the surface, leaving a texture that was equivalently icky to the texture of the blanket, and ruining the surface for future firings. 

While it was an interesting experiment, we will in the future, replace the blanket with a new one, and just use it normally, or put kiln shelf or fibre paper in on top to get a pretty texture on the bottom side of a fusing.

Silver Stain

I'm playing a bit with silver stain. I've never painted on glass before, so that's fun. I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I am in love with the rich tones that the silver stain turns on Bullseye French Vanilla. It's awesome, and seems to be quite varied.

Fired in the little painting kiln to 530C for about 10 minutes (hooray for the very precise controller on that one!)

So I love the rich reds on the bullseye tekta, (bottom two on the left) and the brown that the french vanilla turns (top left.) The stain is much too thin to really use to engrave through - you can see some of the cuts I've made into the stained pieces. I wasn't expecting to be able to do much in the way of shading with it, but I am kind of amazed at just how thin it really is. I cut through it immediately, just by touching it to an engraving wheel. Though I didn't try it on the copper wheels with fine grit, so maybe I should see how that goes. It's sort of too bad, but it might be interesting to see about using silver stain in the fire polish stage of my engraving to highlight some of the cuts. So, I'll need to do another test for enamel and silver stain on Bullseye whites and french vanilla at 600C for 10 minutes.

On another note, I need to get down to the metal studio to see about making frames for things.  Jeff and I were looking at some of the engravings on a light box in the studio and I think he's finally been the one to convince me that they need light behind them... Natural light is too harsh, but just a little bit of LED or fluorescent light, and very controlled, would do them good. They're definitely better with a little bit of light than without it.

National Museum of Scotland Archives

We went to the National Museum of Scotland Archive Center Tuesday to visit the Invertebrate Wet storage department. It was amazing.

An amazing mollusk. See, I told you it was amazing.

The curator told us that a lot of the collected specimens (especially the snakes, and the older foreign specimens) were collected because someone accidentally (or in fear) killed them, and then realized that there was "that crazy collector" down the street who might pay money for the slightly damaged body to add to their collection...

A turtle skull in a box. As you do.

These frogs are perfect. The label tells me so.

Fish samples

Cephalopods in jars.

I loved the narrow spaces, everything was stored in one of those library shelving systems where only one row can be opened at a time, and they are moved with big wheels like a printing press has. Just the density of information was overwhelming.

Reflect/Project #4 Progress

This is simple... here's some shots of where I'm at with the engraving... Beginning stages right now. The photo I'm working from is below.

Some Colour Tests

I've been making some simple colour tests, layering light aquamarine with french vanilla with dense white and cutting through it in the bottom picture, and above just a few different colours fused and engraved. I'm leaning towards using french vanilla as my top layer colour in the engraved panels, because I love the bone-like texture it has when I cut through it. I think I'll use it with colours that don't react with it, though, I'm not really fond of the interface reaction between the two layers, though it could be a neat thing to explore as representing a kind of pencil or pen-like outline.

Settling In

Well, I’m getting beginning to find my feet here at the Edinburgh College of Art, it’s been slow for me, but I'm beginning to feel like I'm getting there. Happily, a family visit brought me my lathe, which is nice. The cold shop here is great, it has a wonderful set of stone wheels, and a number of diamond cutting lathes, and two little antique copper wheel lathes that each have a lovely collection of wheels (glee!), but the Merker fills the gap between the fast and huge wheels and the small, slow and precise copper, so having it here is a good thing. It's got a better view here then it did back in Lux, too.

The community here is lovely, we're a really small group, which is nice. We've not stepping on each other when we work.

I got introduced to the CAD/CAM suite a little while ago, which is terribly exciting! There should be some (I hope!) interesting experiments coming out of that soon.

I'm happy to be living in Edinburgh, it's an amazing city. Today the fog was so thick that the castle disappeared, and we went to the National Museum of Scotland's Archived in Granton. I have a mountain of pictures, so I'll post some of them in a couple days, but for now, a picture of the Salisbury Crags taken from the North Bridge (part of my route to school!) which are in the middle of the city. I'm so lucky to live here!