How I Make Some of the Things I Make

Wednesday night Hot Pour.   Hot Pour is a type of glass casting where you dip a metal ladle into a 2200 to 2300 hundred degree glass furnace scoop up the glass much like pulling really really hot soup out of a big square cauldron.  

Almost all hot glass working is a team sport.   In this photo I pulled the ladle and Evan uses a pair of garden shears to snip the excess glass off the ladle. 

After the glass is removed from the furnace and is in the ladle the pourer walks over to the mold in this particular case a graphite mold and pours the molten glass into the mold the other person waits until the right amount of glass is in the mold then the trail gets snipped again with the same garden shears.

Most of my work has been sand cast up until recently right now I am working on a couple graphite cast pieces some with clear glass, but this particular one is poured clear and lots of different glass frits, and powders are sifted onto the mold.

Sometimes I just sprinkle the color on with my hand

I have about somewhere between 20 and 30 different glass colors currently.... The current body of work tends to use three color groups, blues and greens and other cool colors, reds, oranges, yellows and warm colors or this week I tried white, blacks, browns and earth tones.

The first batch I cast this way I left the surface alone creating a flat but textured surface of not completely melted glass colors.  This second batch I used a series of leather punches to give the surface even more texture.

If you want to see a drawing from this series of work you can look at the previous blog hopefully I will have more finished work up and photographed soon.   I may also put up a post featuring the work my friend Evan Voelbel cast that week as he cast sand and I did but I figure I should ask permission first.  In the mean time feel free to check out his website http://evanvoelbel.com.  I should also say thank you to my lovely and talented photographer Kat Ely who came in to shoot photos of our pour.   You can check out her website at KatElyArt.com