Bit of a Tutorial...well , ish

Hello again!!...

Thought I'd do a bit of a 'show and tell' this time on one of my dichroic bangles. This piece is one from my new tartan inspired dichroic jewellery range. Firstly....forgive the bad photography and if you get any glimpses of my apartment, sorry for the mess....it's too near Christmas for housekeeping!
First off...I use stringers for the tartan pattern. To get them nice and neat I use a textured glass called reed which has evenly spaced grooves for them to rest in. Stringers are basically glass rods. I use the 1mm ones in these pieces. Depending on the pattern I mix transluscent and opal ones to get a good mix of colours.


The pics show just how much glue I use! I use glass fusing glue that burns of nicely when the glass is fired.

Here's the glass after the glass is layered...I'm not at all precise in the cut at this stage as the next step is firing the glass. I 'tac' fuse the glass at this point. This level of fusing in the kiln adheres the glass to each other but keeps the texture of it at the same time.
When the glass is completely cool I cut it to the required shape. Because it's been tac fused the glass doesn't fall apart when it's cut.

I use 2 layers of the stringer glass for the pattern and a clear top layer slightly larger than the other to fuse over...I also add a dichroic glass piece to the top with the pattern on the top side which give the finished piece a metallic highlight.

Once the glass is fully fused I grind it to take away all the sharp edges and round off the corners. I then fully fuse it again.
After all that it's ready for shaping. I 'slump' fuse the glass over a steel mandrel to get the required shape...very hot work! Once that's all cool I can take the bracelet out and see if it's the right size. If I need to enlarge or shorten it, it'll need to go back into the kiln yet again!


And here's the finished piece! Check out my other dichroic bangles here!

TTFN!