Oh, just playing with glass in the kiln...

I think that my favorite artistic creations are probably the things that make me smile or outright laugh when I see them. I have to humbly admit that I cracked myself up with the results of this little slumping experiment. I slumped a broken wine glass in the kiln, just to see what would happen. Hee hee - I loved the results, and I'm pretty sure that if I did it again it would never turn out as well!

Here are a couple of funky shots of the flat glass compared to a normal one -

I have a martini glass that needs to be slumped standing up, I do believe. So stay tuned for that.

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Here are some more things that I've been doing in the kiln lately:

Snowflakes in the kiln, ready to fuse

Icicles made from roughly-matched scraps of art glass

Those icicles, after fusing

Just one little icicle, with a penny for scale

I was pretty happy with the look of the hammered copper wire for a hook. I made hooks like that for all of the icicles and hung them in a vine maple in our yard, along with a couple glass snowflakes and the wine glass.

And finally, I made a bunch of glass stars to sell at a very small craft fair (but only sold a few) -

These are a fundraiser for my P.E.O. chapter. All of the proceeds go to our scholarship fund for local women pursuing post-high school education. My intentions were to try to sell the stars from my Etsy store, but I just didn't have time to get that all set up. So NEXT year I will!

One final little vial melting project

This last experiment was inspired by my wonderful neighbor Carol.  When she was over looking at my flattened insulin vials that I ended up making into the windchime she commented that it would be cool if there was enough room left in the flattened bottle to fit a little flower in it, and then you could hang it on the wall as a tiny wall vase.  What a great idea!  So I slumped a couple of batches of vials, trying to not let them flatten too much....

Some bottles are a bit flatter than others, but I'd say the partial slumping worked just as I was hoping.  From afar the group of bottles looks kind of like bubbles landed on my work table.

Since there aren't any cute little flowers blooming in the garden right now, I scavanged dried lavendar for my test flower -  

I just wrapped some copper wire around the neck of the bottle to hang it on the wall.  I'd like to try using some finer gauge wire strung with some beads to wrap the neck of a bottle, maybe.

I think this will be one of those things where every one is finished a bit differently.

Here's a nice artsy picture with a penny next to the vial for an idea of scale - 

Another potential etsy item?!

Flattened Insulin Vial Wind Chime

I finally put together a wind chime using all of my slumped-until-they're-flat insulin bottles.  I was disappointed that the glass ended up being so cloudy, but I heated the heck out of them, so I guess that's an unfortunate side effect.  The spirals at the end of the copper wire are sandwiched between the layers of glass.  That was the inspiration for this project - fusing a wire inside the flattened vials so that they could then hang from that internal wire. 

I tried recording a couple short videos to show the nice clinking sounds that these little bottles make when they knock against each other, but unfortunately the sound didn't come through well at all.  

I just love these flattened little bottles.  They are just over 2 inches long when flattened.  Hmmm...I just realized that they are kind of the shape of an old-fashioned hot water bottle.   

Luckily when the bottles aren't slumped so extremely they seem to stay clear.  Stay tuned for one more slumping project with these babies that I'm still playing around with.  And I have an idea involving LED lights, but that's a whole new direction for the future.

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...