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About Glass

FUSED GLASS:

Glass can be fused many different ways to give different looks and textures. These are just a few terms and descriptions.

Full Fuse: is heating two or more pieces of glass to the consistency of honey where they become one piece of glass. This happens at about 1500 degrees.

Texture Fuse: Heating two or more pieces of glass to a lower temperature so that they maintain their shape overall but the edges soften and each piece fuses to the adjacent pieces. To maintain the texture you might only heat this piece to 1350 degrees.

Slumping or Sagging: Slowly heating glass over a mold. Gravity forces the glass to slowly drop or sag into the mold and take its shape. Slowly means heating at about 100 degrees per hour until you reach 1250 degrees and hold it there for about 20 minutes.

LAMPWORKING:

Working with glass using a torch. Many people today make glass beads this way to be used in jewelry. Once you have mastered the torch you can move on to make larger and more complex figures and much more.

ANNEALING:

All warm glass creations must be annealed to prevent internal stresses in the glass that can cause cracking and/or breaking. Annealing is slowly cooling the glass between the temperatures of 1100 and 700 degrees.

DICHROIC GLASS:

(From Wikipedia) “NASA developed dichroic glass for use in satellite mirrors. Multiple ultra-thin layers of different metals (gold, silver, titanium, chromium, aluminium, zirconium, magnesium, silicon) are applied to the surface of glass in a vacuum chamber. The thickness of these layers is from 3 to 5 millionths of an inch. Certain wavelengths of light will either pass through or be reflected, causing an array of color to be visible. Due to variations in the firing process, the results can NEVER be exactly reproduced; each piece of fused dichroic glass is unique; no two pieces are ever the same.”

Dichroic glass is created on either black or clear glass. Glass artists of every type use Dichroic glass to add glimmer, sparkle and depth to their art.

STAINED GLASS:

The ancient art of cutting colored and textured art glass into shapes to form a pattern. The shapes are then connected together by either wrapping each in copper foil and soldering them together or wrapping each piece in lead came, then soldering the came together.

   
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