#MAI Behind the Art: Working with Frit Glass

[Music] so it all starts with a round piece of glass that you use at the center and from the center out we use glass frit which is ground up glass about the size of sand particles and from the particles when we fuse it in the kiln those pieces will melt together kind of edge to edge the problem is when we make a large disk this big out of just frit if we try to reheat it it doesn't want to reheat it wants to crack so typically what we have to do is is melt this together and then pick it up so I don't want just one color I want a couple of different colors in it so I'll combine the different color frit in the jar first and you can see it's kind of sand shaping colors and then we're just trying to get it very thin on the Shelf so I'm laying this all out on the Shelf of the kiln my goal for this piece is to kind of go from a dark to a lighter so I'm actually going to add some more glass to this mix but I'm going to have you up on the darker colors the orange the dark red and even some black [Music] and now I'm going to mainly go around the base of this and I'm basically bringing the thickness of the frit up to the thickness of the glass so I can cover the edge of that glass and you can kind of see subtly how it's gone from the dark out to the light I want to keep going with that and I want to take it out now to the lighter so I'm going back to my orange and yellow and now I'm going to switch actually to a little bit of clear [Music] feels not like a cooking class once I've come back to where I started I can start working towards the inside of the piece to bring that light color down in but if I don't build it up thick enough I won't have much to pick up so so from here what we do is once this is in the kiln we use a a metal piece that was made by a welder friend of mine that's actually gonna go on here it's actually wired to the lid of the kiln to hang just above this my initial design was the idea of a metal plate that would have a hole in it and but need to come apart so I knew it needed to come apart I didn't know how that would be accomplished so I took it to a welder friend he'd made the plate he made the two pieces and then he actually made these two tabs that hold the two sides together because once the glass melts through the top it joins on here this has to come apart so he came up with a creative idea of the tabs and the screws in them and then the idea of the hook this glass whenever it's heated up over a thousand degrees kind of loses its mind a little bit so whenever we come back to a thousand degrees we have to anneal the glass or cool the glass very slowly so it doesn't crack or break later so when this is flat this is hanging just about a half an inch over the glass once it's melted through and grabbed on this literally lifts the piece up and then the hook hooks on to a bar that's across the top of the kiln so the newly created vase or vessel can hang there and cool down slowly in the kiln we'll program the kiln to cool down over time the foot we do ahead of time it's a layer it's two layers of glass on the bottom about three layers in the middle that goes upside down in the center so as we heat that up that centerpiece actually becomes a little anchor and pulls it down and will fuse itself on to the center of this where you're using this kind of as a mold to kind of just Bend through touch down onto there and then we literally lift it up off the shelf with that while it's hot [Music]

Channel: Montgomery Community Media

Views: 57,945

Keywords: Tony Glander, Frit Glass, Arts Barn, Gaithersburg MD, Arts Craftsman and teacher, Montgomery Arts Infusion Episode 7

Id: 0cxhKDijdbc

Length: 7min 50sec (470 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 06 2018