The fused piece: 3 of 3

After a rather inspiring tutorial I decided to take on a third window, the effects I was getting with the breaking and re-forming were so nice that I wanted to make a piece that was just about that. So no leading, no grout, just glass. I'm really pleased with the results, but unfortunately it did not survive the first firing. The annealing time was not long enough and when it came out of the kiln it had cracked into three pieces :(

As embracing breakages is an underlying theme of my work this was not a problem, I added another layer of glass which provided even more new fascinating results. And with a much longer annealing time (three days!!) the work survived and was once again back into one piece. The new layer has trapped air in places and really adds to the effect of the glass, it looks almost like water.

Next time I will add this extra layer of glass straight away, as there were parts of the glass with oxides left on the surface. This meant that there was no reaction in the oxides, if I had put the glass on the first time these oxides would have been trapped, causing them to react more thus producing bubbles as apposed to lines of color. Here are the results...

The VERY scary job of linishing the edges! 

The finished piece