Slumping Insulin Vials

Experimenting with the glass from gin bottles led me to this idea.  Well, that and being fascinated by something that I think was called a "worry tree", I saw in the movie "Ray".  It was a tree with all sorts of empty glass bottles hanging in it, and they would clang against each other in the wind.  Somehow these two things got twisted together in my mind and I decided to slump empty insulin bottles with a piece of copper wire inside so I could make a wind chime out of them.

Here's how a vial looked before going in the kiln - 

And after, with a penny to show you the size of the bottle - 

I REALLY love manipulating stuff like this.  I wasn't sure what the glass would melt like, but because of my experience with the gin bottle glass I assumed these bottles also wouldn't melt as readily as the fusing glass that I am used to playing with.  I love the way it kind of flattened but kept its shape, especially the opening.

So for my next batch I laid out 8 bottles on my kiln shelf/tray and started them in the kiln about an hour ago, and this time I didn't put the wire in quite as far, hoping that the spiral at the inside end will end up in the flat middle part of the slumped bottle.  We'll see.  The bottles really wiggled around when I moved the tray for pictures and put it in the kiln, so things may end up slightly askew...