This is another one of those use-up-clean-up pages: I duped the scrimshandered persian page by accident, and was left with the older page^[1] My current go-to way of dealing with this is to find an older image of something I never got around to posting that could have conceivably gone on the page: in this case, a one-off fused bowl I made at my friend Margaret's house.

Fusing in general—and pate de verre in particular—has interested me for a long time, but I've never really gone anywhere with it—mostly, I suppose because I was

1. afraid of destroying my kiln elements with the high temperatures needed for fusing
2. unable to deal with crashing the kiln to prevent devit.

This despite the fact that my friend Margaret, as far as I could tell, never really worried overmuch about crashing her kiln—she set the cycle & checked it the following morning. She also didn't mess around with kiln wash, preferring instead the easy-clean paper. Strictly speaking this is a collaborative effort—I arranged the various scraps onto the clear circle (which Margaret no doubt cut) and she both fired and slumped the piece, and would have done any cleanup it required.

Even so, it has bubbles at the joins of the scraps everywhere: it is a crude piece, both technically and stylistically—dichro is all very well, but not a dark purple randomly plopped amongst a bunch of mid-range pastel opals! The random frit in front bespeaks of laziness or boredom on my part, what with throwing that stuff in, instead of finding (or making) another scrap to fit. Tch, tch, tch.

The photograph wasn't that great either—nasty moire hot spots from the photo-cube I was using—however, one thing that has improved over the years (unlike my fusing skills) is I've learned enough of gimp's layer and cloning tools to clone out the worst of the hot spots and combine exposures for something that's not too awful.

So now this is finally documented.

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.

Sylvus Tarn