Best way to buy Dichroic Glass

hello and welcome back to my series on fusing dichroic glass because so many of my projects involve using glass at least five and a half or six inches in diameter I thought I'd better provide a useful source for buying Dai crow because I've certainly discovered some ways not to buy Dai crow so when I talk to glass fusers about different dye crow fusing techniques I hear this a lot who die crows so expensive I I don't use it because it's so expensive so this is actually a printout from an online catalog page from a website that sells stained glass and glass fusing supplies sort of hobby level stuff and hundred dollars for one pound of broken straps and here's a hundred and four dollars for one pound of broken scraps on thin die you know thin glass just couldn't believe it it's amazing because I'm paying two hundred dollars for a full nineteen inch sheet so this is where I get my die crow it's a company called CBS and they actually have a an online catalog and they sell retail online as well as wholesale so that's my source so this is the way to buy quo that makes any economic sense at all it's buying ten pieces at a time that reduces the shipping cost considerably per piece and you can develop a good pricing relationship with the company if you place orders of ten sheets at a time so if you can't do that on your own then get together with a few friends and split an order [Applause] the first thing I do when I receive a order like this is I make a I take a little sample piece off each sheet and I do a test fusing of it and number them I've ordered a little over 200 sheets in the last five or six years and the only time I had any breakage was I had two sheets broken once when my order was shipped by UPS by mistake so I highly recommend using the the post office and not UPS yeah so I just take a little tiny snip off each sheet for a testing and I'm sure to number it right away I've gotten them mixed up before and it's very confusing and I also date them so I I know which test sheet I'm looking at the testing is really important look at this one here it's 2019 and they stopped using these labels probably seven years ago and this is very old stock so if I take a test piece off here and fuse it and I like it if I order this again who knows what they'll send me so that's why it's super important to test every single piece so here I'm testing my clear pieces from this order and I've got the coding side face up and I'm going to cover half of it with a piece of clear so I can get a test result from exposed coding and coding that's been cased under clear so I'll fuse this and write the date on it and keep it with my stalk so here's a look at my sample now that it's being fused now I can get a better idea of which of these codings that's exposed is too scratchy to use in some of the embossing that I'm doing so that's just an example of the the kind of little test boards that I make up here's another one here this one has quite a variety of different sheets on it that I tested and I tested them with texture because I wanted to see how they responded to being being folded up and down on the surface some of them are okay and some of them are quite Scratchy so I would strongly suggest buying these sample cards before buying any full sheets of die crow you can even take little little cuts off of them - to do test fusing zhan them I think they're around $100 and they cover a variety of different assortments now this one here is just the regular colors on on black and this one's those same regular colors on clear but they mount them on these black cardboard backing sheets so what what I did is I I ripped the cardboard off and I put clear packing tape on so that I could actually see what they look like see the transmission colors better actually suggested this to the company that they that they package their clear samples this way but I didn't get a response so I don't know where they're at with that anyhow they're about $100 each and they're well worth having so with this material there's absolutely no waste everything gets used so for a sheet like that that has a fancy sparkly design on it I'll do a large bowl like this and that you'll use up a fair chunk of the sheet I'll be able to get a smaller dish on this side we've got a another slumping mold here that's an even smaller dish and I can get one of these on each side of here like this and then the rest of this sheet that gets cut up like this and then that will be made into pendants and jewelry so I'll cut these like this and grind them and heal them and make them into independence and these pieces are from the sides down here like that so there's virtually no waste and these little spaces in here this waste will be cut up into half-inch squares and made into earrings and then the only actual material left over from that are the little tiny pieces here and here's a look at that material and what I do with this is I have drop-in workshops in the summertime where people can come and design their own dishes and they will pick through this and cut it and place it on a kiln board and then have a dish fused and slumped and here's an example of what those dishes look like and they're about five and a half inches wide and I just cut a clear piece of fusing glass like this and they're placed on top and fused and the leftover scraps from the kids summertime drop-in classes I spread out on a kiln shelf and melt a piece of clear on top and slump it into a bowl so there's actually no waste at all so there you go an economical way to buy dichroic glass there's a bit of a myth out there that Dai Crowe is expensive that it's not actually that expensive if you did a quarter share with three other friends and you got ten sheets and cut them up into quarters and each person could experiment with ten different designs and colors then realistically for five or six hundred bucks each you could sell a few dozen earrings and pay for your entire share so you know it's really not that expensive and it's so so playful all right enjoy I hope this has been useful

Channel: MarkLauckner

Views: 12,918

Keywords: fused glass, dichroic glass, glass fusing

Id: TJKGx7rr5FM

Length: 9min 10sec (550 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 02 2019