Creating Bottle Templates
One of the tricky parts about fusing bottles is knowing how far apart to place them, and if the end result will fit on your mold or texture tile, or even your kiln carving pattern.
It’s very easy to create reference templates to help you most efficiently use your kiln space and resources.
Start with one of bottle of each size/shape that you typically fuse with. I have a red wine bottle and a white wine bottle (I’ll also add a beer bottle, just for good measure). 
Now I’ll fire them to a full fuse and flatten them out: 
Now trace them onto a sheet of cardboard:
Then cut them out and label each cut out with the type of bottle it is: 
As I flatten more bottles, I’m going to make a list of the brand and color of the bottle right on the template that it matches. That way I have an easy reference that can be used to:
- Place Bottles on Shelves
- Check Molds for proper sizes
- Cut fiber paper for kiln carving
- Plan for projects like Fused Bottle House Numbers