Hello I'm Jill Tisbury and welcome to FiredGlass.
If you hear clicking in the background that's because the old Cub Fuser is doing its thing,
so it'll be clicking in and out as we're doing this. I thought we'd talk about freeze and
fuse because there's quite a lot of people using this technique at the moment there's quite
a few people on the Facebook forums asking for information about it. But apart from that
it's fantastic to have a few boxes of elements up your sleeve like this. I love it when we've
got a whole set of things that we can play with. So there's moulds galore available on the
internet in various places. I had quite a few from sugar crafting and I don't really use moulded
things on sugars because I tend to use flowers, you know sugar flowers instead. So I have now
commandeered them and they're all part of my glass repertoire. So there's a box full of sort
of weird things I guess here. I've got flamingos and we've got seahorses and shells. I've got a
box full of leaves and a box full of flowers over here. So you can get moulds for butterflies.
So little things like this, absolutely love and that looks fantastic you know when it's on
a piece. So you may have seen this chap on the Facebook Groups. He's painted in enamel but what
I wanted to do was make sure he looked like he was in his habitat. So these, quite a few of them
are the freeze and fuse leaves. So your leaves once you've created them look like this. So you
can see they're reasonably thick. So they're really quite sturdy and then once you actually put
them onto here and do whatever your process is. I have to say I wouldn't go further than a tack
fuse with this stuff because you're going to lose the definition. So this is tack fused. I used
quite a hefty tack fuse so 760ºC on some of these and you can see it's kept most of the definition.
So if you tack fused it lower you'd have even more definition. But they're really useful for making
it look like a realistic foliage on there so that's how you use them. That's as I say what
they look like once they come out of the mould. What we're going to do today is actually fill this
mould. So this is a project I wanted to do for a long while is an aquarium... aquarium lantern. So
that's coming up so don't forget to subscribe and hit the little bell icon because you'll actually
see that in in a few weeks. So this mould is a great mould to use you can probably see on here
if the camera picks this up nicely. I'll move this and I'll put this next to it because it's always
nice to see what these things come out like. So we've got some, I think these are Blue
Tangs. They're meant, well I've done them as Blue Tangs anyway. And we got some Clown fish.
We've got some... "What would you call those?" 'Fish'. Fish! Good job the cameraman's here
isn't it. They're almost like long tail neons something like that. But I did them as red
and white, I thought they look quite cool. And then at the top of this mould you've got
this sort of sea grass and seaweed. Now you probably see here when you've got a mould
with things like this that are really fine. This one's great because it's come out in one
piece. This one hasn't, most of the pieces snapped when I took them out of the mould because they're
really quite thin in places. Absolutely fine, still fuse them because when you push them
together on your piece once you've actually fused them to their you know, just fused state
like these they'll look fine. And the other thing is I got one of these seahorses out and you can
see what happened. Because his tail is very thin it's broken either as I've took him out the mould.
I think it was when I took him out the mould to actually put him in for his first fusing. So
let me see what have I got. I've got a little tin of these over here. So you can see, maybe a
bit thicker, once we start using him he would be wrapped around some sort of weed. So I probably
have some stringers that are thicker than that and so I'd probably have these on here and it's
fine that his tail's broken because you're not really going to see it once you've got him tangled
around the weeds. And so don't throw them away if you think I've broken it it's absolutely no
issue. You can see I've got a box full of broken flamingos and broken seahorses and we're still
going to use them on our aquarium. Cool right let's get ourselves sorted then let me put these
away so that you can see my little setup here. I've got boxes for everything. I'm a nightmare
to go shopping with. If it's in a nice box I'll pick it up! Right I've cleared the decks. I've got
myself some of this sort of craft paper. This is brilliant. Warm Glass actually put their Tekta,
wrap their Tekta in this so don't throw it away because it's always useful for either this kind
of thing or when you're re-coating a kiln shelf. Need some tissue because I'm going to
potentially have some water around the place. I've got my mould so we're going to do
our little fish tropical fish. Need some water and a pipette is always useful. And I've
got some tools. So this I've got quite a few painters palette tools around the place if you
can get a cranked one like this then it's quite useful because when you hold it and you wipe
it across here because sometimes you want to maybe smooth out some of this powder
that you're going to use in here and it's quite useful. So 2 pallet knives.
Let's see what else. This is good this actually is a little pokey thing. Technical term for it and
this came with one of the moulds. So it's quite useful for pushing the powder down and making sure
that you've got no air. And if you haven't got these which are frit shovels and tweezers that are
available from most glass suppliers if you haven't got those... then get a hammer and some cheap
spoons. And I spoke nicely to my husband who made me a whole set of these things. And so this is
great for directing things and this is great just as a shovel to put frit or powder in. So um yeah
if you haven't got one of those this is brilliant; cheap spoons, hammer make the shape you want. I've
also got a set of these these can be quite useful, tiny little spoons I think they came from
Amazon at some point. And a paintbrush. Perfect so let's just get rid of that,
put that over here. I've got myself some eyes. We did, we made some seagulls and I think
I've got some little eyes in here. A little beady... there we go little beady jobs. And they
are useful obviously because our fish need eyes. See that always reminds me of the joke
now. What you call a fish with no eye? Fsh! It's not good is it? Right so my fish have
got eyes. So before we actually kick off just make sure you've got those in there.
I've got a whole series of colours. I'll just move my water so you can see this a
whole series of colours of powder. And I've got some frit as well. You can actually use frit in
this let me shove those down there for a minute. And so you need to decide what colour you're going
to make your fish. I still want to make some Blue Tangs I think. And my Blue Tangs had a little bit
of powder and a little bit of frit in the bottom. So this is some powder I need my mask so obviously
when you're working with powders ideally you want a N95 mask. I'm going to put this on because then
you can hear me, rather than it being so muffled. I'm getting steamed up glasses as ever. So
the powder, this is just normal opal powder, just red opal powder. And what I'm going to do
is just get a paintbrush worth of that and just pop that in the bottom. I'm going
to show you one of these fish because the technique for all of them
is exactly the same. A little bit more. Just a tiny bit more. And I'm just going
to paint that... oh his eye's falling out! Because I think you can probably see there's a
little bit of texture in the bottom of this mould. So I want this to drop into the texture. Now
I'm not going to put my water in at this point because what tends to happen
is that this powder is so fine that the powder gets sucked into the surface
tension of the water. And it would just sort of bring all of that powder into one globule
in the middle. So I'm not quite going to put my water in. I'm going to put a tiny bit of
frit, so this is fine transparent frit. So probably this fish is going to be a bit
more red on it than the others. Maybe it's the male version, who knows. See all these
stories that you make up for these things. So I've got dense white. I had clear
somewhere, crystal clear, there we go. I'm just going to put a little
bit of crystal clear in the bottom for the fin. You don't need very much at
all as you can see this has got a little... pectoral fin there. I'm just going to put
that clear in there and I'm probably going to put a little bit of clear along here
for the dorsal fin all the way across. And all I want to do there is is make sure that
this looks a bit sort of transparent as opposed to a really solid colour because most fish
fins look fairly transparent don't they. And this tiny bit down here, there we go. So not very much at all, as you can see, of the
powder. I'm just going to get my paintbrush... ...make sure that's kind of filled in
here. I don't really need to make sure it's completely filled because I'm
going to use the turquoise. So those fish that you saw if you remember the Blue Tangs were blue, hence the name. So I'm just going to
get this powder, I'm going to tap it all in here. And the reason for doing it like this is to try and keep those layers that I've put
on the bottom undisturbed when I put the water in. So what will happen now is that
the water will start to seep into this. And you'll see what I mean. I'm going to go right
to the edge and I'm also over the edge. You can tidy up at this stage if you want but what
you'll find is that when you put the water in surprisingly.. what you're going to do next, you
may need even more powder. So let's get the water. So I've got a pipette in there, really useful.
And then I am going to drop that water all over there. There we go. And you can see just give it a
tap on the side... whoops turn your mould around. You can probably see what's happened there. Now
I don't know if you can catch this detail but you want to... the surface tension of the
water is really quite strong and sometimes you need to encourage that surface tension to
break so that it goes right into those edges of the fins. Now what you've probably seen
there is that that's full of water at the moment and the powder has sunk to the
bottom. So put some more powder in. This is a great technique to use. Even when it's
heaped up on the side there, soon as you tap it you can see that it drops... ...out to the bottom. So we get a bit
of tissue. At the moment we'll just... ...you can see I'm not taking the powder
off. I'm just taking the water off there. And at this point we can just make
sure that we've tidied up these edges. And as you press it kind of goes
down into there. Now this stuff that is coming off here I'm just going to keep hold
of that because I just want to make sure that if I need to fill it I'll
fill it with some of this. This will dry out and go back to powder if you're
finished with it. I'm just going to go around that edge tidy that up a little bit. Because
obviously when it freezes it's going to freeze all of this. Now we're tapping to make sure
that we've got all of that air out of there. Now what I've found when I've done this
is that people will say make sure... ...that you take all of that water off the top. I
don't do that and what I've found is that just by leaving that water on there just make sure that
the surface looks shiny and that will allow it to freeze even better. For me it works even better
and once it's frozen. This will take probably half an hour to an hour. I'll leave it in for
an hour for that to freeze and when it comes out I'll put it on one of these which is a bisque
tile. So this has just been coated with kiln wash. I just do it maybe once every 3 or 4 firings
that's absolutely fine. So you can get these from, I think Warm Glass actually have them. Well
certainly at the time of recording they've got them on offer, but they're a few pounds really
for you to buy them. But you can get them at some pottery suppliers as well. So you need that
once this is frozen you can take it out and you can put it on there and I leave mine
overnight then for the water to evaporate. So make sure that your fish looks like that and if
it doesn't just one more little drop on top of it. Freeze it. Good to go. So that's the technique.
I'm going to fill the rest of these and then we're going to put them in the freezer.
And I'll show you what they look like. I'll take them out and put them on here and
we'll we'll leave them then to dry overnight before we fuse them. Okay so I'm just going to
finish the rest so chat amongst yourselves! Right I have finished my fish and I've done
one of the corals in here. I used my cranked palette knife just to smooth off this and
I put some of the green that was sort of scraped off there into this coral but this coral I want
to be white. So I'm just going to do this a slight different way around. I'm going to put some water
in that because there's little bits at the bottom and I'm going to get some of my dense white
powder. Don't need massive amounts as we know, and I'm going to go over the top of this. So because it's a very very thin shape weirdly
this one sort of performs better than that coral. I think because that's long spidery and this is
chunky. Need a little bit more water on there. Give it a little tap around the edge.
The reason you're giving it a tap as well as smoothing down you can see here.. oh
it's just burst! You want the air bubbles to come out because sometimes that surface tension holds
onto the air bubble. So this thing, you could use a knitting needle, a crochet needle probably
something like that. Not a crochet hook but you know some cable needle
that's what I'm looking for. So give that a little tap if you
lift it up let it drop that's fine. Get my tissue and just lay that gently on the
top it doesn't take the powder it takes the water and then you can just give that a little flattened down. Just
to make sure it's all covered that make sure it's all in there. The reason
I'm scraping this away is that once it's frozen. Let's just take that off there I'll capture
that back for us to use later on in a different mould. Yeah the reason I've scraped that away
is that when you take this out of the mould once it's frozen you don't want that lacy back...
well you might want that lacy background if it's pieced coral like that. I'm just going to put a
little bit more on top of that and a bit of water because I think that that could go back in the
middle there. We go just make sure when you scrape this they scrape off nice and level and
don't dig in because what you don't want to do is remove powder that's going to help this to set. Yeah so what I was saying was you
you want those spaces in between so that's fine so that's it so that's my mould
filled. I'm just going, you can see how this has dried out while we've been talking here,
so I'm just going to put a couple of drops on there just to make sure that that's
going to settle to the bottom and that's got a little bit of water in it. That one's
okay, and that's fine. Just give it a tap. Last tap to get any air bubbles out. I'm just
going to take that off because that's right sort of on the edge that's me done. So I'm
going to go take this and pop it in the freezer. Sounds weird doesn't it when you
put these in the freezer obviously ideally you'd have a separate freezer. I
don't have a separate freezer for these so I'm going to put it on a piece of tissue just
so there's no danger of that getting anywhere. So stick it in the freezer and
we'll be back in about an hour. It's been about an hour roughly and you
can see as I bend this. So you don't, you want to be quite careful when you do it, that
you don't snap any of the really thin bits off. There we go pick this out and pop it on your
bisque tile. There we go, what's happened to his eye it's obviously sunken back in. That's
absolutely fine you could always put an eye on once you start to fuse it. So just gently
ease them out there's the other tang oh look he's got a nice eye in
there and we've got our Clown fish. So if you've got any bits like this, this
is the lacy stuff that I talked about just gently if you can just sort of flick that
off the edges. Well they're going to look nicer, take this side out. If you can't flick that
lacy stuff off then it's easy to get off once you have actually fired your fish. So these may
may look like long tail neons when they come out. Just be careful how you do it. It's
like christmas isn't it opening these. So it can go on there if you space these so that
you've got obviously enough space around them so that they're not going to fuse into one
another. You can put them wherever you like at this stage you can shift them. You can't
if you're going to leave them overnight. Now these are the tricky ones to get out
and already this has started to crack. So you could either leave this tiny bit
longer, or you could see if you can ease it out and if they do crack like this bit here, I'm just
going to ease this one out and I'm going to fuse them all separately because as you saw at the
beginning there. You can put it back together and you can maybe put a little bit of powder over
the top of it and it will be fine. You could try and push it together there and
see if it'll fuse it may well do. Just be really gentle it's
where the fronds get really thin at the bottom there. Just roll that over and
let it release itself. Almost just push it up with your finger, oh that was pretty good
actually. Now I'm not going to bother about these lacy bits in between here because I'm actually
going to get those to the top bit came off. There you go I'm going to get those to come off when
I'm finished. I'm going to move that to there move that to there and this bit just turned over so
we'll see if it fuses together. Sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't. Get some
tweezers there just to shift that into place and there's some tiny
tiny little bits left in there... ...which may come out they may not. That end bit
comes out so let's fuse that and that end bit... ...that's not gonna work that's going in my pot of meadow mix stuff I think. I
might have already broken this one but this is fine we'll do it in bits so this
will be like tiny bits of coral white coral. So we'll put this back together. I think
I would probably have left this maybe another half an hour or so but that's fine
we can rebuild it. Lovely there we are. Just make sure you're not in a
really hot room when you do this. There we go so those bits will fire separately. And you can put them together, this
one doesn't want to roll over does it, there we go. See if we can get
that to add back onto here. Lovely and that's it. I'm going to
leave that overnight now the reason I want to leave it overnight is I want a
lot of that water to evaporate out of it. Because the glass kilns really aren't made for
having a lot of water vapour in there. So it's not really that good for a glass kiln. So when
you come back in here, well especially because my cub fuse is going, when I come back here in the
morning this will pretty much be all dried out. So if I tried to move it it would just be powder and
I don't want that to happen. So get them where you want them leave them and then take that to your
kiln. I tend to put it on some little one-inch kiln props just so that the heat circulates all
the way around. And then when you fuse it you're going to take it up to somewhere in the region
of 690ºC and hold it for about 10 minutes. And and that's it. So the firing schedule is going
to come up on the screen just now. And you can you can take note of that and that's it you'll end
up with this. So this one is that chap there and this one he's actually oh maybe he's
that chap, he's shrunken a bit if he is. So I can't remember which one it is. Might be
that one, yeah so they're fabulous. It's great to have a box full of those. Happy freeze
and fusing and look out for our aquarium project video that we're going to be doing in the
next few weeks. So I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you found it useful. Have a go, get yourself a box
of those and show us what kind of projects you do. So it'd be nice to see some of that and see
your comments on this. Don't forget to subscribe and don't forget to hit the bell icon and then
you'll get notified of when the next videos are coming. Thank you very much for watching and
I'll see you next time on FiredGlass, bye.
