Over the winter, I tried out a new fused glass technique call Frit Stretch. This technique takes advantage of the way molten glass will flow to create a uniform thickness. By stacking the glass to the sides of a shape, the glass will flow inward. When frit is placed on top of the glass, these small pieces of broken glass will stretch as the glass flows.
For my first attempt, I used several colors of coarse frit that I had in my supply. The teal, green and orange colors looked nice together. Unfortunately the pink frit was too light and did not show very well.
The hole in the center of the casting closed up after a second fusing to level out the glass. I added some green vitregraph and white pebbles to create a plate with a Lily of the Valley design.
After this initial project, I realized that coarse frit was too big for this technique. I have since tried other frit stretches with medium frit. The smaller pieces of glass look much nicer. I will post more about these other projects at a later date.
After seeing how my first attempts at frit stretching turned out, I recently tried stringer stretching. Stringers are thin, approximately 1mm, round strands of glass. I thought if I used twelve sections, it might create a nice background for a clock. For this project I used ridged clear glass with bits of stringer placed in the ridges in a pattern.
I really like how this stretch turned out. The hole was bigger than I expected and did not close when I did a second full fusing. To remedy this, I printed a backing of white PLA on my 3D printer. My attempt at making a clock turned out nice. Even without numbers, it is easy to tell what time it is.
After making this clock, I tried out another clock idea that I had seen on-line. This was a piano clock originally made out of printed plastic, but I wanted to try making it with glass.
First, I made a test tile to if cut pieces of white glass and black glass noodles (thin glass strips measuring 1mm x approx 4 mm) would make the pattern that I needed for the piano keys. This test tile turned out really nice. Not wanting to waste the glass, I added a jewelry bail and made a pendant out of it.
For the keyboard clock, I cut 84 pieces of white glass and 60 pieces of black noodle. These were contour fused to an 8″ circular piece of black glass. Another 5″ circular piece of black glass was placed in the center of the larger circle and the cut glass was carefully positioned around the perimeter of the black backing glass. A couple white pebbles and some waterjet cut musical notes were added for details and to designate each of the hour markings. After the project was contour fused, a hole was drilled in the center using a diamond drill bit and clock workings were added. Voila, a wonderful music themed clock! I have more music themed glass ideas that I hope to make sometime soon.
