Week 8 (Week Beginning 15/03/10)

Polishing

Not the most exciting of weeks spent the whole week polishing the piece I had just gotten out the kiln. I definitely prefer the look of this new one to the one from last week, I still want to get both polished up for practice but I will be making this new one a priority.

While all this exciting hand lapping is going on the other piece is still wiggling away on the vibraplap and taking forever . I did take it off and hand lap it for a bit but it chipped several times even when I had beveled down the sides. Starting to get annoyed with this one...


I like 600 grit its soooooo smooth, like rubbing silk on silk...And one step closer to shiny.

At the end of the week the new piece (one on the right) was at 600 grit ready for the pumice wheel next week and the other piece I had hand lapped up to 320 after getting fed up of waiting for the vibralap to do it.

When I got the glass out of the kiln last week I needed to cut off the excess glass so I covered the glass in plaster and set it up in the lap saw. I managed to get the plaster off the glass in one piece, I thought it was quite interesting so I've kept it, might help me develop my ideas.

Week 7 (Week Beginning 08/03/10)

Kiln Casting With Gaffer Casting Crystal

The image to the left is that of the glass that came out of the cast I put in at the end of last week. The effect isn't really what I wanted but it is really pretty. The jade green and clear have mixed quite a strange way creating waves of colour within the piece and the jade green has split in to lots of different shades of green.
I have another couple of moulds for this shape I will try another method of casting them with the other billet and a half of clear and jage green I have left to see what different effects I can get.
I have already started cold working this piece getting the excess cut off and flat bedding the surfaces at 120 and 220 grits, I would like to get this to a finely polished standard so I get more practice for future pieces. And i wrote in my proposal that I would need to practice my pollishing skills.

Viralap

After a couple of days of hand lapping I started to lose the feeling in my hands and the will to live so I inquired to the use of this little piece of kit, the Vibralap. It's like a flat bed but you leave your piece of work on it and it grinds the surfaces down for you, but it takes a lot of time. I had gone through the grits 120, 220, 320 and started on 400 but for some reason it was taking ages to get all the permanent pen cross hatching off (you cross hatch with a permanent pen or using a china graph pencil so you can tell when you have ground the layer back to a flat surface) I think it's because I started using a different sheet of glass than I had the day before so one of them mush have been ground down too much in one spot making the sheet uneven. So I set up the vibralap, it needed to be level so the bottom of it was propped up in places and the legs adjusted while a spirit level was sat on top so I could tell when it was level moving it around occasionally to check the whole thing was level. Next I needed to clean off the bed that the glass piece vibrated on, to get rid of any bits of glass dust or old grit. When that was all clean I poured on some 400 grit and mixed it with water, I was told to make it a little thinner that I would if I were hand lapping then when it was turned on come back to it every 10Min's or so to check on the glass or top up the grit or water if I think I need to.




The image too the right shows how much was ground down after about twenty minuets. I returned again to the piece every 10 - 15 minuets during the day and the amount ground down didn't seem to be very much. It would probably work a lot faster if there was some more weight to the piece also the glass that I had been hand lapping on to begin with may not have been that flat. It seems this may take a few days just to get this one surface flat, think I may go back to hand lapping but for now I'll leave it on a little longer to see how it gets on, and I'll get on with something else...

Casting Billets (Second Attempt)

It's not that I don't like the other piece, it's just not how I thought it might look. So I'm going to try popping the billets straight into the mould. I have been told that with this method I will be able to see a seem between the two layers of glass, but you might be able to make them blend together the two colours the longer you hold the kiln at the top temperature. I'm going to use the same kiln program as I did for the first piece as it seemed to cast quite well, I shouldn't have to hold this as long because it hasn't got a resiwar to flow through but the longer time might help the colours blend. Again I have used a billet and a half to cast with and like the other there will be excess which is a shame. It might be worth trying with the gaffer frits at some point so that I don't end up with as much waste.


Here is the kiln program I used:

50 ⁰C/hr → 500 ⁰C → Pass hrs
Full ⁰C/hr → 830 ⁰C → 3.00 hrs
100 ⁰C/hr → 600 ⁰C → Pass
15 ⁰C/hr → 440 ⁰C → 4.00 hrs
10 ⁰C/hr → 360 ⁰C → Pass
20 ⁰C/hr → 310 ⁰C → Pass
50 ⁰C/hr → 21 ⁰C → Pass
End

More Plaster Models

Here are some of the plaster pieces I got from using the two part mould I made last week, I am strating to use them to think about how to arange and carve my final piece.

And here is a nice bit of carving I did...

Week 6 (Week Beginning 01/03/10)

Looking For Inspiration

Over the weekend while looking for some thing to draw, I came across my sister sketch book which had a couple of pictures of and eroded sandstone rock face. I thought the curves in it were similar to the ones I had been carving in plaster. This is the drawing I did of one of the photos (the images quality isn't very good, my camera was dying when I took the photo).
I found out that the photos were taken in a place in Bridgenorth called the Hermitage. So on the Monday I took a bus to Bridgenorth (not sure why, but it is a nice place) and carved caves into the sand stone. I had been told that the are had been closed off after the caves collapsed about a year ago this was probably why I wasn't able to fine it or see any directions. Any way I managed to find a steep muddy path to a sandstone rock face that had eroded.
Looking at the drawing now it looks a bit like body, might be worth doing some life drawing at some point in the future for my sketch book. Anyway....

Here are some of the photos I took (of Sandstone):


Making Multiples

I've started getting bored of carving shapes I might never use and didn't particularly like so I thought I'd try to cut a shape I was happy with. So using one of the larger triangles I'd cut I used my small arcitectual form to measure out how to make a scaled up version of it but without the corner cut off. I took the piece after soaking it for a while and stated to cut it out on the architectural could get it cleaned up and make a mould of it.
I managed to cut the edges that were at 90 degree angles to each other but there was an angle I had a bit of trouble doing, at first I tried drawing out the kind of angle I would need on the plaster and follow that along but I didn't seem to get it right, and the pieces stated going some odd looking angles so in the end I just went for it with the view if it goes wrong its just plaster and I'm sure I could cast another block of plaster the right kind of size to do it. Not expecting to get it right, Yes! I DID IT! Go me XD I squealed in delight and I'm not too embarrassed to say I did a little happy dance. But, I didn't take a photo of that, I took a photo of the boring plaster polishing smoothing bit *yawn* fortunately I was still in a good mood and I was quite happy just to be at that stage. The image is the soggy plaster piece on a piece of sandblasted glass then I sand it down on the glass by moving it around in a figure of eight motion. Some of the sides didn'tas they were still flat from being cast onto boards, the most challenging bit was the odd angle I had cut, but still it wasn't that wonky and not much trouble to get flat.
Now for the exciting bit mould making but not before soaping, not sure if I've mentioned about soap before if I haven't you should know about it cause it's somethign mould maker/plaster worker should know about, it lubricates the plaster or anything with a porous surface to stop the plaster from sticking to it.When making moulds you should always soap the table where your pouring your plaster to stop it from sticking also. When preparing to make this mould I soaped my model atleast seven times because I really didn't want to ruin my.
The next step after what seemed like it could have been several hours of soaping, I started setting up the boards around the piece. I left two sides flat against a board and the table so they wouldn't be covered with plaster. So when I make more of these triangular models with the mould in plaster or wax I can choose between a large surface to pour into or a smaller.
The boards around the mould were secured with clay and had rope tied around it. I then had to mix 15pints of water and plaster to fill the mould. Unfortunately my mould wasn't strong enough, and the board at the back that the plaster model was resting on slipped away and the wet plaster started to seep out. Lovely Mark (The Plaster Master) came to my rescue, and caught a large amount of the wet plaster in a bucket and poured in in while I held the boards in place, it's a good job 15pints of plaster was a little too much.
Thinking about it now I should have made my mould with the larger surface lying down as the weight of the plaster was too much for the taller boards, and if I had lay the piece down I could have had boards around the piece saving a lot of plaster, silly me.
When I removed the boards after the plaster had dried I found that I had lost the flat surface for the larger side of the triangle and had to carve down the surface with a surform.

The surform is the red tool just at the bottom of the picture, its a great tool for flattening off edges and carving down surfaces and making them look flatter and neater. To take the weight off the piece Mark cut the waste bit of plaster off for me on the band saw (this is probably the most help I've had off Mark ever, I'm not really one to ask for help I just like to get on with things and make my own mistakes, but I'm not against getting a little wisdom form others now and again) I got that surface surformed and tidy up the edges of the mould a little.

I was originally just going to use a board every time I wanted to use this mould to make a model but because the surface wasn't very flat I chose to make a 2 part mould out of it. Before pouring any more plaster on to the mould I made some natches (little indents) in the plaster so when I take a mould off them (to make little lumps) there is a negative of the natches so its easy to locate where to put the 2 halves of the mould together (you can see these little bumps on the images above and below). Next step soap.... When the mould was all soaped up I put boards around it and secured it with clay and rope (didn't really need to rope just after having the earlier spillage I didn't want a repeat). For the other half of the mould I only needed 2 pints of water and plaster

Mould all done and ready to use :)

Just need to remembered to soap it up well when using plaster and giving it a good soak when using wax.

Casting Billets

After giving it some time and though I decided to use clear glass and jade green as the colour for this piece, I came to this disition after looking at some of my glass work from last semester. The odious colour would have been the copper blue but I found a couple of piece where I had used copper wire and I preferred the colour in this, it had a slight tint of green to it and seem more of a natural colour compared to the copper blue. I also thought the copper blue was a bit too bright and I wanted my work to have a calming flowing watery look to it to reflect the wave I had carved out the plaster model.
Using the both billets in the image above was going to be too much glass for this piece so I got the jade green billet cut in half to reduce the weight.
Again I have chosen to a flower pot as a resavwars for my piece. I put the jade green at the bottom of the flower pot and the balanced on top. I want the jade green to be at the tip of the piece and hopefully as the clear starts to flow to the two colours will blend together to make the colour change suttle. I'm not sure if this will happen as this is my first time using the billets. It's a good job this is a rather small piece, the glass for this cost just over £17, compared to about £3 if I were using just clear glassma.
As I would like to make a bigger piece I think its a sensible idea to make a smaller piece to test before jumping into spending loads on something you have no idea how it will work out.

Here is the kiln program I used*:

50 ⁰C/hr → 500 ⁰C → Pass hrs
Full ⁰C/hr → 830 ⁰C → 3.00 hrs
100 ⁰C/hr → 600 ⁰C → Pass
15 ⁰C/hr → 440 ⁰C → 4.00 hrs
10 ⁰C/hr → 360 ⁰C → Pass
20 ⁰C/hr → 310 ⁰C → Pass
50 ⁰C/hr → 21 ⁰C → Pass
End

*To come up with this program I used a chart provided on the gaffer glass website

Week 5 (Week Begining 22/02/10)

Composition

After working on carving some new shapes I decided to work on how I could put the pieces together to create a final composition. None of these will be how the piece will finally look because I plan to make bigger pieces and the carving will be different.

I like the idea of having the curve going from one shape to another as if it is flowing through from one shape to the next and each piece having a different carving so each one is like an individual piece.

Investment Mould

I wanted to start getting this shape into glass. I will again be using the lost wax method to make my mould then use kiln casting to make get the glass into the shape. I made two of these mould so if one goes wrong I will have a back up or as I plan to use casting billets if I don't like the way the piece looks I can use a different method of casting them i.e. I could use one to do an open cast and the other using a flower pot to do a reservoir cast as I have done before. To make the mould I used a mixture of 2Kg of Plaster, 2Kg of Silica and 1.2Kg of HT mixed with 4liters of water. After the moulds has solidified I removed the clay from the bottom of the piece and steamed out the wax. To get the last bits of wax out of the mould I poured in cold water to get the wax to float to the top of the mould. The mould was then left in the drying cupboard. When its dry I will be able to cast into it. I really wanted this mould to be clean and dry to prevent any dirt or bubbles getting in to the glass.

Gaffer Casting Billets

In the arcitectual glass room there is this board of samples of casting billets I know I want to use clear and a blue colour in my work but I'm not sure yet. these are the blue colours that are avalible:

There are some other colours on the gaffer site called pale copper blue and pale jade green that I have looked at.