Strip Construction

I've always liked the way strip construction looks, especially when using Bullseye Glass French Vanilla. The following piece I made by alternating strips of French Vanilla with clear and added some blue green streaky glass as accents.

The center of this piece was made by a technique called a flow bar. The kiln is heated to 1700 degrees which will cause the glass to flow and swirl a bit. You start by building a dam so the glass will be contained. At that temperature, the glass is probably the consistency of honey. If you don't dam, the glass will spread out to be a quarter of an inch thick.

Then you add random strips of glass finishing it with a lot of clear. This is what the flow bar looked like before it went into the kiln.

Here is what it looked like after it came out of the kiln and the dam removed. Then it was sliced on the tile saw into 3/8" wide pieces and then laid out to form a pattern. I had to grind the pieces on the flat grinder to square them up so they would align better`.

Now I begin putting it all together. I cut lots of strips of clear and French Vanilla and arrange them on end. There was quite about of re-arranging going on until I came up with the final design.

Then I filled in the corners. The easiest way to do this was to continue alternating strips. I could have cut the pieces to form the square shape but instead, I continued alternating my pieces until I had enough to form the corners.

So now my design is complete. Although all my pieces are not exactly the same length at this point. they will fuse together and I will cold work the piece and cut the edges with a tile saw. Now in order to stop the glass from flowing, I needed to build a dam around the entire piece and secure it so it doesn't move during fusing. Due to the odd shape, conventional dams wouldn't work on this project. 

This was accomplished by using fiber paper and straight pins. I built the piece on a piece of fiber board so I would be able to insert pins to keep the glass from shifting as it heats. Here it is in process of being dammed. You have to make sure all the pieces are pushed against the center piece and wrap the fiber paper tightly around securing with the pins.

After carefully wrapping the glass in the fiber paper and securing with way too many pins, it is now in the kiln ready to be fired. 

After about 18 hours in the kiln, it has now cooled and is ready to be cut. The following picture shows what it looked like after I cut the corners off and to give you an idea how thick it is.

Then it was back in the kiln one more time to do a fire polish. This softens the harsh edges and will round them and make them smooth and shiny.

Now on to the next project.