FOXY Fusions Blog

I really like getting my glass hot…but sometimes, I don’t want it to get too hot because I like retaining a structure for my designs. For example, I’m careful not to heat my FOXY Rectangle designs too hot or too long because I want to retain that clean linear shape, that picture frame effect between the bottom and middle layers is soooo satisfying to me. So for my FOXY Rectangles, I use a tack fuse. This means I heat the layered pieces of glass until the glass just sticks together, allowing each layer of glass to keep its own individual texture, shape, and character. Every kiln is different (I told you this wasn’t going to be easy!) so for my environment, this means I don’t heat the glass hotter than 1450 degrees…and I don’t let it soak longer than a few minutes. The longer glass soaks at a hot temperature, the more it wants to round out the corners…and I want my rectangles to be rectangles!

For my FOXY Circles, my methodology is completely different. I need all the layers of glass to completely melt and fuse together, forming a block with a flat rounded surface, in what is called a full fuse. A full fuse occurs somewhere between 1450 and 1550 degrees, and the glass needs to soak a long time to fully bond together, and then it needs to anneal a long time as the temperature reduces to let the glass settle. After I’ve made the block of glass, I use a drill press to core out the circle pendants, I coldwork the pendants using a glass grinder to give them a nice shape, and then I refire the pendants using a fire polish. A fire polish heats the glass to its melting point to give it a shiny appearance, getting rid of those rough edges from coring and cold-working the glass to form the pendants. Typically, a fire polish is somewhere between 1300 to 1400 Fahrenheit.

I hope this has helped you understand a little bit more about what I do to create FOXY Fusions designs!

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