Including silver wire in fused jewellery

Here is a picture of a piece of fused jewelery I made yesterday with a piece of silver wire added between the glass layers to act as an attachment for a leather thong. Not one of my successes or I am being too picky maybe. I had protected the wire with ceramic fibre and covered it with some dichroic glass and a clear topping. I was disappointed to see that the wire had more or less passed through the dichroic and was too apparent for my liking. I had expected it to be further back.

I do not know how to recitify this I will probably ask a question on on of the glass fusing forums, but I have thought of adding an extra layer of glass, so it would be stacked like this:

5.Clear on top
4.dichroic
3.thin black
2.wire insert
1.thin black at the bottom

Since I am really only at the experimental stage with all of my fusings I will probably try this out. I have had quite a fvew great pieces and only a couple of failures. I have kept very precise notes and have 'invented' a form for myself to show the kiln shelf layout, side by side with a list of the composition of all the pieces.

I am writing this as I wait for my next firing to finish. I was confused to find that when I switched on my Paragon SC2 kiln this morning, the controller would not work properly. The 'UP' arrow would not work at all, which made it a long process to programme as I had to hold my finger on the down arrow for ages to come down from 99.99 to 00.10!!! And I could only access Programme 3. I have sent an email to the company in the UK where I bought the kiln and hopefully they can tell me if it something I am doing wrong. I dread having to send the controller back to the UK to be fixed, but it is all still under warranty.

Today was a typical day Chez nous.......constant visitors, and I have just beenup and down like a Yo Yo serving drinks and checking on the kiln sitter all the time. Anyway it looks good.

France has just had its second hurricane in 18 days, and they seem to have decided to give them names like in the states. The latest, yesterday is called Quentin and the one 17 days ago hsa been called Klaus......I have no idea why they started with Q and why they are not going in alphabetical order like anywhere else? Who knows???? Maybe it will be explained.

The airports in the north of France were all closed yesterday, but Air France had predicted the chaos this may have caused and they pre-booked thousands of hotel rooms and people were just put in taxis and sent away for the night. Maybe there was an ulterior motive here as well. This was the airport building that collapsed not long after it had been built a couple of years ago.....maybe they were just avoiding a potential disaster of this happening with an airport full of people sleeping on the floors. Of course it was a full moon, I have been keeping weather records for over 6 years now and we often seem to get dramatic changes in the weather around the full moons, yesterday was no exception. We in the southern corner near Spain escaped very lightly, just heavy rain and some wind. Apparently there are 500,000 homes without electricity again in the north west. We tend to get very little coverage of this on French news - not like having Sky News or CNN constant coverage.

OK I need to get supper in the oven and switch my fused glass off - best not to get them mixed up...............

Art Clay Silver with fused glass

I have read recently that these two media go very well together. So today I will try to put one of the cabochons I made yesterday onto a 'mount' of art clay silver. I have some fine silver bezel that I could surround the cabochon with first and then attach the whole thing to a backing of rolled out metal clay. I will cut a hole in the back of the backing as I think this will benefit the dichroic glass cabochon, allowing the light to shine through.

I have been experimenting with metal clay now for a few months. For anyone who has never used this it is 99.9 per cent pure silver mixed with an organic binder to the same consistency as pottery clay. This means that this can be worked as clay, no traditional metalsmithing involved. No hammering, no cutting - just use like clay. There is no waste, every tiny bit of scrap can be saved and put in a jar with a tiny bit of water. This makes your 'slip', a very wet form of clay which can be used to 'stick' together components parts of a piece of silver art.

The piece above was my first piece of silver clay jewellery, a wearable piece of artwork. I am sorry the photo is not too great. I am experienced with pottery and using clay in all its forms as an art teacher, but to work on a piece so small I found really difficult. I am used to throwing large lumps of clay around a table or a wheel. Metal clay arrives in tiny packages of 7, 20 or 50 grammes.

We have sleet and snow again here in the south of France so I will be inside today experimenting with the metal clay and glass combinations. I have found some great links and tutorials for these media and will publish them in my next posting.

The cats will be glad I am staying in today.

Kiln sitters and power cuts

Two posts in one day?????? I have just watched a Blog video tutorial on how to add photos so here goes......

This is a picture of the whole kiln shelf of glass fusings I made yesterday. It was nerve wracking programming the kiln, I was holding my breath. I started and stopped it several times to make sure the programme was correct - OCD showing itself??? LOL. All was going well when we had several power cuts.....we have been having them since the hurricane and snow this area of France had about 10 days ago. Anyway the kiln sitter would not reset itself so I had to try and reprogramme it after each power cut. We had three cuts in all and having read more about cuts when firing I realise I was really luck as the cuts were right at the beginning and the last one was near the end of firing so no damage done.

It is fascinating to watch the glass through the kiln window as it starts to sag and melt and change shape, this is when the glass is fusing together. I had not a clue what was correct at this stage and I know that some experienced fusers will stop and start their kilns according to the state of the fusing pieces. I had no idea so I just let the kiln do its job, I can make adjustments another time.

Scary this blogging lark.......

Suddenly a whole new learning curve to climb - blogging - never thought I'd start a blog.

I was inspired to do this after reading another blog via the Warm Glass Bulletin Board. I have recently started to learn how to fuse glass. My birthday present last year was a small Paragon SC2 kiln, at that time this was intended for making silvery clay jewellery, now I have progressed to making fused glass pendants and cabochons. Ultimately I think I will merge the two things together.

More about the jewellery later.

I live in a remote watermill in the French Pyrenees mountains, in the wine producing area of the Corbieres (lovely red wines, some great rose wines too).

My husband and I retired out here in 2002 from the UK and have never been busier! Hence the title of this blog - 'Another Quiet Day in the Corbieres'. Something happens every day to distract us from our plans for renovations made the night before. This catchphrase is a standing joke among our circle of friends, because there really is no such thing as a 'Quiet Day in the Corbieres'.

The animals keep us busy, all of whom are rescued strays, even the llama. We have dogs, cats (11), tortoises, goats, chickens, a rabbit, a peacock and pea hen, and are surrounded by loads of wild life, wild boar, badgers, lynx, deer, muntjac, foxes etc. So feeding and putting to bed are major daily events.

The initial photograph on this blog is of my most recent new venture in making fused glass. When I learn how to post more photos I will make up some albums. Until then please make do with this.