My Rainbow Row panels are waiting for warmer weather to get their resin coating, so in the mean time I revisited my dichroic sunset window project. I’d been stumped on what glass to use for the main sun in the center of the window, but today I made a commitment (well, at least cut out the shape even if I haven’t yet glued it in place). It was also time to sort the dichroic pieces I cut for the background by color. The sheets of dichro glass I am using are gradients of colors varying from yellow – pink – purple – blue. The pieces look like they are the same color when the light is reflecting off of the surface, so I have to use a light tray underneath to sort them out.
Sorting the background pieces.
My high tech sorting system.
Once the background pieces were sorted, I laid them out in concentric rings around the sun. I still haven’t decided on how I am going to make the water beneath the sun. I started making wave shapes, but I’m starting to think I would like to use triangles, so I am putting that off for now.
Sun with rays laid out, reflective light.
I laid the concentric background pieces for the rays of the sunset out in general in yellow – pink – purple – blue order with some variation for interest. In the next three photos, I’m moving the light tray from left to right underneath the window.
I will need to fill in the top rows with some pieces cut to fit the window later on. For now I’m just getting a feel for whether this is the look I wanted. My next decision is what color dichro or otherwise glass to use to fill out the edges. I have a neat piece of dichro that is very light blue when on the light table, but has a deep red metallic tint on the reflective view.
Reflective view is red.
Not the best photo, but it’s light blue.
This is actually two views of the same piece of glass – one with light reflecting and one with the light behind the sheet of glass.
I used some resin spray on this sheet of dichroic as the coating is unstable and could flake off when I’m cutting it. Now my work area smells like resin spray, so I called it a night. I will revisit cutting the background sheet into squares once the resin spray dries and the fumes dissipate.
I’m also still not sure I like the center of the sun being a different type of glass (non-dichroic). I want to look at it for awhile before I glue it in place.
Today is the last day of the Charleston Holiday Market, and it was a busy day. My Mermaid mosaic, Starfish Trio, and Here Comes the Sun mosaic windows all found loving new homes, along with numerous smaller pieces. I’ve made a *little* bit of room to make some new things, so hopefully I will have time to revisit the sunset mosaic I started a few weeks ago with dichroic glass.
Palmetto & Crescent
Available (in person) at the SC Artisans Center in Walterboro, SC. http://scartisanscenter.com/
Stained glass with resin, 7.75" x 6.25" - $50
Palmetto & Crescent (o/w)
Available in Charleston. Stained glass, resin, glass chips, approx. 6.25" w x 7" h - $40
Rainbow River
Available (in person) at the SC Artisans Center in Walterboro, SC. http://scartisanscenter.com/
Colored mica set in resin 13.5″ x 30″. $250.
Corner Sun
Available (in person) at the SC Artisans Center in Walterboro, SC. http://scartisanscenter.com/
~13.5" x 30". Stained glass with blue shell accents set in resin in a recycled window. $500
Hummingbird with Flowers
Available (in person) at the SC Artisans Center in Walterboro, SC. http://scartisanscenter.com/
~13.5" x 30". Stained glass with sapphire mica accents set in resin in a recycled window. $500.
My light tray (small, inexpensive one) arrived today, so I decided to try it out. I wanted to be able to see the colors of the square pieces of dichroic glass I cut from a larger sheet when I lay them out on the window. The light tray is a huge help with this, but it is still a bit of a challenge, as the color perception changes based on the viewing angle. When I am directly over the window (perpendicular to it), this is how the colors look:
Perpendicular view
However, at a slight angle, the colors change significantly:
Colors look different at an angle
Short video of the angle changing.
With the light tray off, the glass is metallic. This is due to the dichroic coating, and in very dim light the colors disappear and are replaced with a metallic shine. This photo doesn’t really capture it, but it’s the best I could do at the moment.
Reflective light
This Art Deco Sun / Moon mosaic is a good example of this type of glass:
It’s not the best photo (I’m really not good at photographing these), but here is the finished Mermaid Tail Mosaic. Time to clean up a couple more old windows to recycle into the next artwork!
Mermaid Tail – stained glass, glass chips / flakes / globs, etc. set in resin, in a recycled window. Approximately 13.5″ x 30″
Today I poured the resin on the mermaid tail and decorated it with glass chips, chunks, flakes, etc. I even used a little of the blue shell material. Now it needs to cure before I can bring it upstairs for a better photo.
Resin poured, background decoration in progress.Just waiting for it to cure now.
I was having a bit of a mental block with the mermaid tail mosaic, but today I forged ahead and got it pretty much ready to pour the resin after the glue dries, maybe tomorrow.
Tail with slight shape adjustments
After I reshaped the tail slightly, I started trying out some different options for decorating.
Some glass balls on the edge?Some seaweed?Some small seaweed and bubbles?
I finally decided I liked the small seaweed and bubbles. I added some swirls and plan to add a variety of glass chips when I pour the resin.
I’ve been pretty busy making beads (petmemorybeads.com) the past couple of weeks, but today I took some time to start another mosaic. I started with a huge sheet of Spectrum light blue iridized glass that I have been holding onto for a long time. I cut a good sized chunk of it off so it would fit on my work space and started to make pieces for the mosaic.
What was left after I cut some off for the mosaic.
Next I cut the smaller piece of glass into strips, and then into squares, and again into triangles and started arranging them on the window where I drew a mermaid’s tail a week or two ago.
Strips of glass
Squares of glass
First I laid out the outline of her tail, then started filling in the gaps.
Laying out the edges first
I haven’t glued anything down yet, just getting a feel for how it looks. I need to eyeball it for awhile to make sure I like where it is going before I commit with glue. I plan on filling in some more and then decorating with some glass embellishments after I pour the resin. I also need to decide how I want to decorate the background areas – will there be shells and seaweed? Maybe some swirls and bubbles? Still need to figure that out.
Here is some of the fruit of the labor of prior days. The sun mosaic is complete, and I have 8 coasters and some beads ready, as well.
Here comes the sun!
I had a new request for some memory beads, but I’m not yet sure what type she will want. Since I had some resin handy, I just made a selection of beads. They turned out pretty well!
Rondelle (6 mm hole), rondelle (5 mm hole), ball beads.
The coasters I made with the quick layering technique turned out OK. I think next time I will swirl the water pigmented layers a bit. I was hesitant to do that because the layer underneath wasn’t cured, but I think the pigments need to be moved around a bit more. I also think the look of the bubbles at the edge of the water are improved with this technique.
Today was a very busy, but productive, day. I finished the sun panel by pouring the resin over it, set a few memory beads in their molds, and made 8 coasters using the layer method where you don’t cure the resin overnight between layers. At times I felt like the proverbial one-armed paper hanger! It was a challenge doing all this in one day, but hopefully it was a success. I will find out tomorrow when I can take the beads and coasters out of their molds. Here is the basic rundown of the methodology and things to note.
Pouring the resin.
Pouring the resin on the sun mosaic was pretty straightforward, since everything was pretty much secured in place one way or another. I mixed up 16 ounces of resin and used almost all of it to cover the glass. After pouring, I immediately used my heat gun to help distribute the resin evenly across the window as well as to remove bubbles that form as the resin settles under the individual pieces of glass.
Pouring the resin.
I thought about adding some glass chips to the resin, like I had planned to do, but I just wasn’t sure how that would look in the end, so I decided to save that to try on a smaller project that won’t be such a big deal if I don’t like the way it ends up looking. I normally use the glass chips in a clear background, but this whole window has glass in it, so I chickened out.
Using the heat gun.
The difficult part comes after the resin is poured and bubbles start to emerge. For the next 45 minutes to an hour, I had to repeatedly use the heat gun to remove bubbles as they emerged in the resin.
Bubbles forming in the resin.
While I monitored the bubbles on the sun mosaic, I used a bit of the resin to make a few memory beads. The beads take very little resin, and I had enough left to make about four of them.
Using extra resin for some beads.
Since the bubbles in the mosaic weren’t slowing down, I decided to make another batch of resin and try to do the coasters in layers without curing in between. I read that this results in a stronger end product, though I haven’t had any “strength” issues with my previous creations.
First layer poured and decorated.
I poured about an ounce of resin in each mold, waited about half an hour, then started placing the shells, shark teeth, etc in the resin. I then waited about 2 hours before the next step.
Added the sand for the beach and the white bubbles.
First I added the sand for the beach, which I made smaller than usual in this batch. I mixed up just about 3 CCs of resin and added the white pigment, then drizzled it in a line along the edge of the “beach” using a small craft stick. I went back and added a bit more after it dissipated a little. I also had enough white resin left over to make a couple of experimental beads. The white resin still spread out a bit more than I anticipated. I just drizzled a thin line and by the time I took photos, it had spread into the sand.
Bubbles added.
I wanted to let this layer cure enough that it would be more gel-like than liquid, as I believe that causes the white pigment to spread out more than I want it to (I really want it to be a thin layer at the edge of the sand and water to look like bubbles when the waves are crashing at the beach). Since it was just a small amount of resin, that didn’t take very long, and I started mixing up the various colors of pigment for the water.
80 ccs of resin for pigment.
I mixed up 80 ccs of resin using a small silicone measuring cup, then split it evenly between the four medicine cups. I then scooped a bit of pigment powder into each cup and mixed it together. After all the colors were ready, I drizzled some of the Caribbean Blue (far right in the above photo) in a few lines into the mold. It will be interesting to see if making lines with the pigmented resin results in a different look for the water in the coasters.
Adding the first color for the water.
After that, I repeated the steps for each of the other three colors. I tried to fill in empty areas with each color. I didn’t add any of the water-pigmented resin to the sand, but I knew it would drift over it a bit after the last step.
Two colors added.Adding colors.
I used up every last usable drop of the pigmented resin I mixed for the water. I really wanted to fill in all the gaps.
All four colors added.
The final step was to add the last layer of clear resin, so I mixed up my last batch of the day, 14 ounces of resin. The reason I go back and forth between ccs and ounces is because my measuring cups have different measurements which I use for different purposes, just for convenience and ease of reading. For some reason, these really had a lot of late-emerging bubbles – much more persistent than I usually see with coasters. That could be a side effect of not letting the layers cure fully between pours. Having to use the heat gun so much moved the pigment / water around quite a bit (at least on the bottom of the coasters). I might need to get a blow torch, as I think they might be more precise in removing bubbles without moving the resin around so much. I’m a bit impatient to see how these turn out, but I have no other choice but to wait until they fully cure to find out how they look. Unlike the sun mosaic, which I can look at while it cures. The only problem with that is keeping curious fingers out of the resin while it is still soft (yes, my children have been known to poke at things during this stage). Hopefully tomorrow I can bring it upstairs to photograph.
Resin curing.
Just a side note – I’m normally a day behind posting these, but I try to write the post the same day as I do the project so all the details are fresh in my memory. That means when I reference “today”, it’s not usually the same day as the post went live. I’ll actually be pulling these out of their molds on the 30th, but I will also schedule this to post on the 30th at a somewhat random time.
