Fused glass retreat - day 1
My mentors Bob & Karen Schmidt of Schmidt’s stained glass & stained glass supplies host amazing glass retreats. I attended a stained glass retreat a few months back and it was fun, educational, and inspirational. Today I attended the first day of the second of the two retreats I am attending back to back from Sunday through Wednesday of this week. We switched over from painted glass to fused glass work for this second two day retreat. This first day of the fused glass retreat was focused on freeze & fuse and vitrigraph techniques.
Freeze and Fuse is the method of taking wet powder glass, mixing it with water then packing it into a mold of some kind so it forces all the water to the top, which is then blotted off with a paper towel. The mold is then put into the freezer for about an hour until the wet powder is frozen solid in the mold. The mold is taken out of the freezer and the frozen frit object is popped out onto a kiln shelf like you would pop an ice cube into a glass. The frozen object is then taken to a temperature hot enough to fuse all the powder frit together, forming a solid glass object.
Vitrigraph in the original Greek literally means “writing with glass”, and in fact, when working in this advanced technique, one can see how it got its name. In Vitrigraphy, a special kiln with a small hole in the bottom is used to heat glass up to 1600 degrees Fahrenheit at which point the glass will become molten. Using special tools and safety equipment, the artist then pulls on the emerging glass to create long thin strings of glass that are shaped into a variety of shapes such as strings, spirals, loops and cones that can then be used as the raw materials in creating a final glass art piece.
Vitrigraph created glass strings allow an artist to create wonderfully delicate patterns and detail in the artwork.
My first time pulling molten glass using the vitrigraph technique! I used a metal rod to wrap the glass as it came out of the hole in the base of the kiln (which was firing at 1350 degrees) and wrap the glass horizontally around the pipe. This created a spring-like glass piece.
This vitrigraph technique uses a gripping tool to pull the glass and twist it vertically to create variations in the internal colors of the glass.
After about two hours the glass was nearing the end of the process and was coming out both thinner and hollow. As my instructor Bob pulled the last glass I captured all of the glass designs we had pulled from the process to show the variations the technique creates.
