Casting Machinerette Rewards

I got two glass castings out of the kiln this morning. Here they are.

I changed my firing schedule. I slowed the down ramp from the high end casting soak to the anneal soak, as I was getting thermal shock cracking. This also helps seems to help with preventing any 'suckies' (shrink porosity defects).

Here are the glass pieces cracked out of the molds.

M. jubilaeus cleaned up some

M. flumine cleaned up some

And here are the glass pieces rinsed off and prior to bead blasting.

I tried to tone down the yellow on M. jubilaeus by adding a lot of amber tint powder to the yellow and orange surface powder (2:1 amber tint to color by volume), but the yellow backing frit just overpowers everything.

"Toned down" new piece on the left, old piece on the right

The red palette on M. flumine, again with 2:1 or maybe 3:1 amber tint to orange and yellow, with red powder surface and backing with a red frit, really, in my humble opinion, is kicking ass. I'll need to be making more with this combination, that's for sure.

I rubbed one of the M. jubliaeus pieces with graphite, and then sealed it with clear acrylic. Actually, they all looked good wet, so I sealed them all with clear acrylic.

The plan is to offer the red two pieces (M. gumbo and M. flumine) as a wall mounted diptych as an appropriate reward to a Kickstarter backer, but I think I will photograph a triptych and submit to New Glass Review (and chances of it getting in: pretty much zero):

(L to R)  M. flumine, M. jubilaeus, M. gumbo