Do react!

French Vanilla Opal (000137) and Turquoise Blue (001116) react. The blue glass is copper bearing while the creamy vanilla, and a range of other beige, red and green colours, falls into the sulphur/selenium bearing glass category. It’s these elements that react, creating a brown line at the boundary. And then there are lead bearing colours, mostly pinks and violets, which also react with the sulphur/selenium glasses.

One of the things I’m learning I have to keep an eye on is which camp a colour falls into so I don’t inadvertently find a creation intended to be full of colour has emerged from the kiln in various shades of dark. In this instance, the reactions were intended. Playing with how French Vanilla, or FV, reacts with turquoise seems to be a starting point for many glass fusers trying to learn about reactions. This piece, adapted from a design for a glass bowl in one of the e-learning books I’ve indulged in, combines these reactions with the stripcut technique I’ve been enjoying in recent weeks. Not having a mould large enough to match the design in the e-book, I made my own design small enough to fit my largest mould and downsized the size of individual strips. It was a bit fiddly in the end but seems to have worked out OK. One of the things I love about this is that the use of transparent glass allows you to see into the structure of the dish and see the reactions at the boundaries between the colours.