The Lion Inside

After several visits to nearby cathedrals, I have taken a bit of an interest in heraldry. I’ve made two cushions – which you can see on my other blog T4mworkshops.wordpress.com  – but was also keen to do something in glass.

I’d recently got some copper foil so thought I’d go for the rampant lion design.

Green Tile with copper lion inclusion

For this tile I downloaded a royalty-free lion emblem from the internet and printed it out at the right size (to fit comfortable on a 4″ piece of glass). I then taped it to the copper foil and cut out both with a scalpel.

I then flattened it out with the rounded edge of a pencil and laid on a 4″ piece of 2mm glass. I had to put a few dots of PVA on the back to stop it moving around. I then overlaid it with a 4″ piece of 3mm tekta glass.

And I think therein lies the problem. I remember reading in one of my books that it isn’t a good idea to mix different thicknesses in the same piece and I think that may be why this piece – when cooked – has pulled in a bit on the edges between the corners.

The second piece only came about because I didn’t want to throw away the negative piece of copper sheet I was left with after cutting out the first lion. So I laid it on a piece of opaque yellow 2mm glass and covered it with a precut piece of 2mm clear glass.

Yellow background with negative copper lion inclusion

This appears to have remained much squarer but has also pulled in equally all round! I know this because, despite leaving a 2mm border between the copper sheet and the edge of the glass, there is a slight rough metal edge all round. I quite liked the crushed silk look that the copper has developed after cooking but there are a lot of large air bubbles on the back.

To fuse these tiles I used an automatic glassfire programme on full fuse and slow firing (as I had my daughter’s uni project in there as well).

I’m enjoying my kiln but have not yet been brave enough to write my own programs. I intend to try making some tiles out of the ton of wine bottles we accumulated over Christmas but have read that they require a high firing temperature to rid them of their impurities and lose that sandy look.