SEED Costings

I thought looking at the costings for this would be an interesting thing since pate de verre is an expensive thing to make and sell because of needing to make a new mould every time you make a vessel.

Materials

Frit 450g clear and 10x 50 g colour- £30

Wall paper paste- £2.49

Plaster 5kg bag – £5.00

Quarts- I couldn’t fine online anywhere so thought it would be about £10

Talcum powder- 2x £1.55 – £3.10

Total for materials – £50.59

Equipment

Scales- £10.00

Bucket £1

Clay- 25kg bag – £11.00

Kiln- £321.00

Toothbrush – £1.00

Total for equipment – £344.00

Hours

Minimum wage – £5.13

Moulds 5 hours

Packing glass-2.30 mins

Filling kiln-30 mins

Emptying kiln- 10 mins

Breaking mould- 30 mins

Cleaning glass- 1.20 mins

Total hours 10 hours x £5.13 = £51.30

Looking at the prices already makes it look like an expensive process to use because of the time taken up to do it and even though buying a kiln is a one of buy I still need to add it in to be able to add some money into the final price so that I can pay off the kiln being bought.

The full amount would be £445.89

Not including equipment- £101.89

A huge change from the including the one off buy of the kiln compared to thinking as if I already had a kiln. Again I think 20% of the equipment being added to the cost of hours and materials- £170.69

Thinking in the way of retail within galleries I will add 40% and do the rule the third years created of multiplying the total by 2.3 to get the amount that they think you should sell it at.

Adding the gallery 40% – £238.97

Multiplying but 2.3- £392.59

Both of these I would say is stupidly expensive but this isn’t a precise amount for my glass pieces this is the rough amount that I would need to buy for my making all of the moulds and some more on top of that because of the first mould I made went wrong so I added some more plaster on top of the total. But roughly it would be with the 40% added they would cost around £47.79 if I had all the equipment like the kiln they would become even cheaper.

I think looking at the pricing for these is really interesting seeing how much it would have cost to of done these things at home. If I was doing this I would need to figure out how much it would cost to run it for the long firing to be able to fuse he glass together. I would probably be more careful and make sure the entire kiln is filled so that the more pieces that would be in the kiln the less mney needed to pay for the firing.

Filling my Kiln

Originally being told that the kiln wasn’t going to be able to go on till either Friday or Monday and panicking about not being to get my pieces done in time for the deadline. Thankfully the kiln got loaded today and I feel 100x less worried about the deadline already.

In the kiln I put my 5 moulds and bought lots of talcum powder to fill the moulds with for the firing. I first put the moulds in and it was only half full so I was a little worried it was a little of a waste of a firing in such a big kiln too. I proceeded to do the things I needed to do to get the glass ready, I filled them with talcum powder filling them just a tiny bit over the top of the glass just to protect it from direct heat from the kiln.

To solve the problem of an almost empty kiln, I did some little colour splotches just to see how the colours look without any of the clear frit mixed in. I was lucky enough to of had Martin helping me with what I was doing with the colour tests and he had some slumping forms that I then filled elements with frit to see how they fuse into smaller detail without being mixed with glue and pat down I literally poured it on to the forms.

The firing has been set to the same as it was for when I was in Cork slightly tweaked but just without the drying firing. I am hoping that it doesn’t need the drying firing as desperately as I think it might but it has been sitting on my desk for a couple of days so I think that it should of dried out enough for it to still be ok without it. Below is the firing we did cutting out the very last step.

The glass kiln was a top heated kiln so the heating elements are at the top of the kiln which I’m not sure about how the Pate de verre will come out of it because we used side heated kilns in Cork, it’s worth a try just to see how it comes out and how it might change the way the glass is fired. I am mostly worried about it not getting enough heat to fuse it all together through the mould but I will have to see how it comes out.

Pate De Vere

Once I made my moulds all I needed to do now was the glass in the moulds. After a long search I spent a while searching for someone who had some wall paper paste. In the end I found some and got a pot of it.

I mixed the clear glass frit and the coloured glass frit together to about 25% colour to 75% clear frit. The fine frit I think was a little bit too fine for what I want my finished pieces to come out. One I got the desired colour mixed I then added about a spoon full of my wallpaper paste. I found that in a couple of my pots I put too much paste in to the mix of the glass so the mix of glass and paste was really sloppy.

Once it was all mixed I then started applying the mix to the sides of the mould. The sloppier mixes I found stuck to the spoon a lot more and were hard to actually get to stick to the mould, so instead of patting the mix on I had to scrape it on in some places which I think might of effected the mould a little on the outside but I think it will still come out ok. I did two layers of glass on each of the moulds except for one because I wanted to see how the two layers and one layer differ after the firing.

I’m really happy with how the glass turned out in the moulds just got to wait for them to go into the kiln and see hoe they come out. I think some of the layers of glass are really thick so I’m not sure what to expect when they come out the kiln, I hope they are as delicate as the ones I made in Cork.

Cups

For my pate de verre I need to find something to make a mould of to be able to create the cups. This is me looking in detail about different cups and if they will be possible to use or not.

These cups I think are nice and I think it would create a really nice vessels but the problem is with them having so many under cuts once a mould was made around it the cup then wouldn’t come out of the mould. As much as it would have been really interesting to of been able to do cups like these because I could of done some the same colour as the original cups and could of presented them together to emphasise my design consequences.

Shot glasses would of worked fine the shape is good for the pate de verre too which means the glass wouldn’t have any problems with going against the sides of a mould this shape but they are a little small. I guess that there could be a possibility of doing a larger line of cups if I wanted to, shot glasses big tumblers wine glasses maybe. Could be an interesting way to think about the final pieces I want.

Styrofoam cups could be something that I could make loads of mould out of. I would just need a different one for each mould which could up the price of the final piece, not by much but the penny count. These might be difficult to make out of the mould I think they might just stick to the mould and make it really hard to try to get out without ripping it.

I really like these wine glasses and could be an interesting thing to think of doing in pate de verre but they wouldn’t come out of the mould like a lot of the other cups. The stem might come out but the base wouldn’t come out unless I found a way to fuse the crushed glass to the base that way I could have a solid base and then the fragile pate de verre for the rest of the glass.

This cup from my cupboard is a good shape for pate de verre it’s slightly angled out so the glass will sit a lot better in the mould. I think something made of glass might be a problem to get out of a mould because it won’t give or move like a paper cup would to remove it from the mould.

I think I need to have a look around uni in the cafés to see if they have cups that I could use because they normally have paper cups even if I have got to pay 20p per cup I take or something. But I think something like this cups could be a good choice for the mould that way it will be able to be bent and pulled out of the mould easier.

Design Consequences

My design consequences have developed to a new skillset and material that I learnt in Cork on Erasmus. The time that I spent in Cork was really good for me learning new skills of being independent and glass work, fusing, a little slumping and pate de verre. The skills that I have learnt have helped me think more about what I want to do next year as well as what I’m doing for this year. This piece of development is coming very close to the deadline and I can only hope that there is enough time to get it done and ready for exhibiting.

The Pate de verre is a workshop I did with Alison Lowery which I found really interesting. The expense of the glass is a little phenomenal and should be cheaper to buy, but there are some companies that so student discount. Due to the money situation I didn’t develop my skills any further while in Cork, and if I had thought of it sooner I could have made some pieces while I was away but because I didn’t think about it till I go back it means it’s a race against time to get it ready.

The reason for why I think pate de verre will work well for my design consequences, is that it’s not changing the material that a cup/glass it made out of its just changing the process of the cup being made. This makes the process different showing the design consequence of how the cup won’t work (in theory) because of the change rendering it useless.

There are other things to do with Pate de verre that makes it a bad choice for making cups. Pate de verre is prone to thermal shock, so there could be a chance of the cup breaking if you could use it and the heat from the water when washing it up could be very drastic causing it to break. If the glass isn’t cold worked for long enough then the glass can be rough and cause small cuts on the persons hand as well as face when drinking.