Slumped Bottle Glass Dish with Enamel Label

Sometimes I get lucky and get a very unusual bottle in the stash. Last fall, when this one turned up in my bottle donation box, I was pretty excited about it.

I thought it would make an awesome dish with the skull on the inside. The first thing I did was cut the top and bottom off to make a cylinder.

 

The next thing was to cut a section out of the back of the cylinder prior to flattening the bottle.

I cut a strip about 2″ wide out of the bottle:

I cut bottles from the inside, if you’d like to see a video of the process, you can see it here. After the strip is cut out, I put the bottle face down in the kiln and slumped it at a low temperature to make a flat piece of glass.

Here it is after firing:

Next I measured the glass to decide how wide to make my dish. I didn’t really want the text on the sides, so I used that as a guide on how wide to make it. I did take into account the slight curve on the thicker glass at the bottom.

And then marked the top with the same width and marked cutting lines.

I cut the lines with my glass cutter which ended up kind of sloppy, I would use my saw if I did this again.

Next I ground the edges smooth and rounded the corners in preparation to slumping. Once the edges were smooth and an appropriate mold located, we were ready to go. I fired this using the slump schedule for 1/4″ glass.

Bottle after slumping:

And out of the mold: