Still Growing Two

This 18" high by 8" tall bowl is a member of my Still Growing series.  With this one I tried to make larger holes within the structure but had to consider how to ensure the bowl would still be structurally sound.  Each ribbon of glass is composed of two pieces of cut glass.  Since clear glass is cheaper than colored glass, many of the strips are made of a cut length of clear on top of a cut length of colored glass.  For the strips of a deeper color, both strips were from the colored glass.  This bowl is particularly interesting because some of the strips are iridized glass.  This bowl is first full fired to 1420 on thin fire paper and slumped on a stainless steel bowl covered with 1" thick fiber blanket.  The fiber blanket is cut and twisted around the perimeter thinking ahead on how I wanted the glass to flow. This is capped with a cut piece of fiber board to make for a nice flat bottom and then a piece of thin fire because I'm sort of compulsive.  It was fired very slowly to 1200 and annealed very, very slowly.  I love the way the light bounces around, through, and into the structure.  It is an interesting shape and changes its mood depending on which side you view.  I love making these forms but have to warn people that out of 5 bowls, 2 have failed on the slump and I think they failed because, for those cases, I didn't composed carefully enough to make sure each ribbon of glass had good anchoring to the other ribbons.

• spectrum 96 glass
• fiber blanket
• fiber board
• thin fire paper