I did a fun thing recently in the studio!
Since all of my work is round, I cut a lot of circular pieces of glass, which means that I generate a great many small pieces of scrap glass. At $115 to $300 for a sheet of glass, you don't throw away the bits! I have shoeboxes full of offcuts, and the yellows were threatening to form their own sovereign nation.
I filled a deceptively-labeled flower pot with yellow glass, heated it to 1600°F, and had a brave friend hold up a cookie sheet while I wielded two pairs of tweezers to pull the glass out of the bottom of the flower pot as fast as it would come out, which is pretty darn fast at 1600°F.
Even at that temperature, you have only a few seconds to bend the thin stream of glass before it stiffens, so I frantically grabbed and pulled, hand over hand, back and forth over the cookie sheet, trying to (a) spread it evenly and (b) not burn either of us. (Safety second! I mean .. first-ish?)
We filled three cookie sheets with these incredible glass nests, then I popped them into a kiln to flatten them so I could fuse them onto other sheets of glass to cut up and use in my work.
Here's a nest that I melted into a sheet of streaky blue glass, which became part of We'll Never Be Royals.
