Kiln Shelf Stacking

Stacking shelves works in my kiln! Hooray! Since I have a kiln with the heating element in the top, I've haven't tried stacking shelves to fuse. I have only seen stacked shelves in a kiln with the heating elements on the side. Yesterday, though, I tried stacking shelves in my kiln, and both pieces came out just fine.

You'll notice the top shelf overshadows part of the one below, but apparently, there is no problem in the fusing.

This is the piece below the multicolored piece. I had hoped the lacy white glass would be more transparent for the cranberry streakie to show. However, the lacy white glass fused more opaque than I had hoped. Since this is one of the pieces for the coldworking class tomorrow, I think I'll turn it over, use the cranberry for the top and the white as the bottom. Hopefully, I'll be able to shine up the cranberry in class so it will sparkle enough to use for the top.

I am quite pleased that I can stack shelves because I have been limited using a 12 inch, round ceramic shelf. It is too small for a kiln run for four, 4-inch coasters, and too big for a quick firing of something smaller. In other words, I could not fit the two above pieces on the 12 inch shelf because it is too small. I did not want to do two firings to get the two, 5" pieces. Now, I see there are more options. I discussed some considerations when choosing a kiln in the 10 Basic Glass Fusing Tools on April 8, 2009. This is a good example of the problems with a 14" kiln. I used half-inch posts on the floor of the kiln for the first shelf and half-inch posts for the second shelf on top of the first one. The cool down was three to four hours longer than that needed for a single shelf.

Tomorrow is the first class in The Perfect Edge: A Basic Coldworking Class at Helios. I will take the above unslumped pieces as well as the three, slumped pieces below. The class promises to be fun and I can hardly wait to make "the perfect edge" on all these fused glass pieces. :D

Until next time, God bless.