This photo appeared in a long ago blog post, and a lovely reader asked for a tutorial, so, at long last, here it is! These little dishes are made from float (clear), cobalt and forest green bottle glass. We’ll be doing some small dishes from bottle glass, additional shapes.
More options are always better! Start with molds:
We’re going to use three different kinds of molds and two different kinds of release, just for fun. Here we have (l to r) an unglazed bisque mold from my local ceramic supply store. Don’t overlook the ceramics store as a supplier, they have lots of good glass applicable stuff.
The little black mold is a small glazed dish from Ikea. Ikea also has pretty good glass related stuff.
The last mold, the one on the right is a mold made from Ceramaguard ceiling tile. This is a soft sheet material that can be sawn up and made into whatever kind of mold you need. It’s available by the case from speciality builder suppliers, or by the square foot from WarmGlass.com
I’ll use standard kiln wash on the unglazed bisque and the Ceramaguard mold:
The glazed dish will need a spray on release:
Following directions, coat the glazed mold. Notice that the spray release makes a fine, thin coat.
Now, let’s move on to the glass part. I’m using a triangular vodka bottle.
I’ve cut the top and bottom off with my tile saw, and then cut down each corner to give me 3 flat blue glass pieces.
If you want to use a round bottle, but aren’t comfortable working with rounded glass, you can flatten the bottles pieces ahead of time.
Next up, trace the two smaller molds and cut the glass to fit them.
Since the ceramaguard mold is considerably larger than our glass, we’re going to measure and cut the glass to fit, rather than tracing:
Then cut the glass into a square:
Then use the angled side of the triangle to cut the corners evenly:
Now, as we are slumping this glass into molds, the top temperature isn’t going to get hot enough to round the edges. Take a quick minute to grind the edges on all three of the pieces of glass before they go into the kiln. This can be done with a grinder, or with a diamond file.
Now, into the kiln:
Fire to a slump firing using the standard slump schedule, or whatever firing schedule works best for you.
