Warm Glass + Hot Glass = Unique Glass

This web page is dedicated to Tony Serviente of Serviente Glass Studios who was kind enough to talk to me about glass during a couple of the Rosen Shows in Philadelphia. He makes beautiful fused and slumped kiln-formed glass like the dish shown at the right. Yes, I am addicted to glass, and yes, Tony Serviente's glass had a magical quality which I had never seen from my "hot shop" perspective. I was very interested to see how I could adapt this kiln-formed woven glass technique to my hobby of hot glass, and you will find my odyssey below, which spanned more than two years... Tony Serviente's kiln-formed glass is available for sale in many dozens of galleries, which are listed here.

I purchased at the Home Depot hardware store a 4 foot long section of 1" right-angle steel (SKU# 030699420407 -- "1 inch x 1 inch x 4 feet angle steel" for $6.98), and cut it into seven sections (approximagely 7 inches long each), and then painted kiln wash on them (that I purchased from C & R Loo). FYI, I tried 3/4 inch angle-iron first, and it was not tall enough for the Bullseye Round Rod (which are 5 mm to 6mm in diameter = 0.20 inches to 0.25 inches in diameter). One of the things I really like about the angle iron is that when I lay it down on the shelf of my little kiln, it gives me a precise spacing, which I will need later, and it sits nicely on the two legs of the upside-down "V".

I then cut the Bullseye round rod into 9 inch sections.

Which I then place on the angle iron

I then run the kiln through this program (I have no idea if this is anything "official", its just what I ended up with, right or wrong:

Which yields these slumped round rods:

When the glass comes out of the kiln, it looks like this:


I put straight red rods through the hills and valleys of the slumped black rods, and then glue with Elmer's glue as you can see here:


And then after slumping in the kiln one more time, I end up with a flatter piece of woven glass:


I then heated this woven glass sheet up to 1250F at school, and picked it up on a two-gather clear glass bubble, which I shaped into a vase.

Here is the finished vase showing especially the detail on the bottom of the vase: