I once made cookie cutters out of brass for my boss (whale shapes). She was surprised.
I found a stainless steel sheet at Lowes. It was a back splash for the wall between the kitchen stove and overhead vent(I don't know what it is called). It's thin enough to cut strips with a paper cutter to a variety of widths. I think I will make some custome molds/dams for myself that are cookie cutter in design. Thanks for such a cool idea. I just have to figure out what type of solder to us to join the seam. The solder would need to have a hotter melting point than the glass.
I have yet to see a cookie cutter that was stainless. That being said I did use a regular Wilton star shaped cookie cutter to make a one off item when my son the freelance photographer called and said the Houston Chronicle needed an aqua glass star 4" across for the cover of their 2007 gift guide with just three days notice to me. I used finely ground alumina hydrate in CMC gum solution painted on the inside of the cookie cutter and cut up Spectrum 533.1 cathedral aqua into 1/4" squares and filled the mold nearly full. I fired in my SC-2 kiln until it smoothed on the top, removed the glass from the mold, cleaned off the release, sprayed with Super Spray and fire polished until the edges rounded enough to suit me. The cookie cutter would only make 2 or 3 casts before it becomes too brittle to use again. This is a scan of the cover shot on draped fabric.
I have used 3/4" x 12' X 0.010" or 0.012" stainless steel strips from K & S Engineering purchased at Texas Art Supply or Southland Hardware respectively in Houston, Texas to make cookie cutter style molds to reproduce shapes in glass using frit casting methods with fire polishing as a second firing to give me the rounded edges I wanted. I have used these to make heart shapes, dogbones, circles and other shapes. A picture of one of the heart molds and some of the items produced from it is located at http://www.flickr.com/photos/10465539@N ... 992512964/
I have left the ends loose to allow the mold to give as it cools and shrinks more than the glass inside it. With frit casting no more than about 3/8" thick I have had no leakage problems with the overlapped ends with this thickness strips. You are limited to the shape you can produce from the 12" length. For larger items I scrounged a piece of 26 ga stainless sheet at a scrap metal dealer and paid a local sheet metal shop to shear it into 1" wide strips. It was a little heavy for detailed molds but works great to dam wire melts or thick fusing with loose ends and iron wire to hold the shape while hot.
Brendalsl wrote:I once made cookie cutters out of brass for my boss (whale shapes). She was surprised.
I found a stainless steel sheet at Lowes. It was a back splash for the wall between the kitchen stove and overhead vent(I don't know what it is called). It's thin enough to cut strips with a paper cutter to a variety of widths. I think I will make some custome molds/dams for myself that are cookie cutter in design. Thanks for such a cool idea. I just have to figure out what type of solder to us to join the seam. The solder would need to have a hotter melting point than the glass.
My guess is that they'll have to be welded, rather than soldered.
With cookie cutter moulds the problem is you need
a lot of them to be productive.
My solution is to
- roll a slab of clay,
- cut several holes into it with cookie cutter
- bisque fire
-kilnwash
and use.
Do you bisque fire in your glass kiln? If so, what schedule do you use? (There's a business where they'll do that here, but if they're busy it can take a while for them to get to it.)
Do you bisque fire in your glass kiln? If so, what schedule do you use? (There's a business where they'll do that here, but if they're busy it can take a while for them to get to it.)
Thanks,
Sherry
Yes, I have fiber kiln rated to 1150C (=2100F). I dare not
go that high, usually 950-1000 C. White kaolin clay does not
fire fully mature in that, but the moulds are reasonable strong.
Low fire earthenware clay (cone 05-06) should fire to 1850F with no hold, natural cooling, no annealing needed for clay. If your glass kiln will not fire that hot firing clay to 1700F with a 20 minute hold will harden it enough to work but it will be more fragile than if it were fired to the hotter temp. Be sure clay is completely dry before firing. It should not feel cooler than the surface on which it is lying. If it is cooler it is still evaporating moisture and is too wet to fire. As clay dries the surface exposed to the air shrinks as the water is removed from between the clay particles. If one side of a clay slab is against a solid surface and not exposed to air circulation it will dry and shrink slower than the exposed side. If the clay is still soft enough the uneven shrinkage between the two sides of the slab will warp the slab, curling it up toward the exposed side. To avoid this warping sandwich the clay slab with the holes cut in it weighted between two flat surfaces with something like a couple of sheets of newspaper on each side of it to remove the moisture evenly until the clay is stiff enough to hold its shape (leather hard). Scrap pieces of unpainted drywall (sheetrock) work well for drying clay slabs and may be heavy enough to hold it flat without additional weights. Finish drying it on a wire rack like a cookie cooling rack or oven shelf to expose both sides of the slab to the air at the same time or it may still warp. A 1/4" thick slab may take a week or more to dry completely when prevented from warping. After firing to bisque kiln wash any surface which may get glass touching it and use your new mold to frit cast your shape. I like to clean all kiln wash from the shapes and fire them loose on the kiln shelf to a fire polish temp. which rounds the edges nicely. A word of caution, Spectrum glass which is not part of the System 96 family will often fire shiny on the first firing but is almost guaranteeded to devit in a second firing if it is not sprayed with something like Super Spray.
A couple of additional thoughts. Frit cast items shrink by about 50% in thickness/volume from loose frit to fired glass so plan your clay mold to allow enough frit to be loaded into it to make the item 1/4" thick when fired. Also, load the frit so it is piled higher in the center of the cavity, taller than the edge of the mold, to push the edges of the fired glass up the walls of the cavity as the glass melts instead of sliding down the walls and leaving sharp edges sticking up when the casting is removed from the mold.
Just a thought....when you think your clay is totally dry , put it on
top of your kiln lid while you are firing a glass load. This will knock out antp hidden moisture so you can bisque without anything exploding!
I tried making xmas tree ornaments using clay molds. Rolled out a slab of clay and punched out the shapes with cookie cutters and then bisque fired the clay. I
made animal shapes like a bison, pig, moose and filled the molds with frit. None of them were very successful because the glass shrank away from the areas of detail and I had to do a lot of coldworking to smooth out rough edges, besides firepolishing. Another brilliant xmas moneymaker bit the dust. I still have a few of them around. Kate
Kate, I've done this some with clay as well as fiber paper and fiber board. You need a fairly stiff cookie cutter to do fiber paper and fiber board, but it works. The trick is to over fill the cut outs as much as you can. I will either make the cutouts deeper than needed (using multiple layers of fiber paper when I use that) so I can fill it with enough frit to compensate for the shrinkage or I just pile it up in the middle. I also use a combination of different size frit so that the smaller sizes fill in the air holes of the larger size. Other than having to be careful of out gassing of the fiber paper and fiber board causing a haze sometimes, it's worked pretty good. I'd use clay more but I don't have the patients sometimes to wait for it to dry so it dries without curling. I have used Sculpy clay a lot to create different designs and then use Hydroperm or R&R 910 to make a mold that I fill up with frit. But then the best way to make things like ornaments is to find a bunch of soap, candy, ice cube or other type molds and use Freeze N Fuse. I've done hundreds of things this way and can fill a 21" shelf up in just a few hours (counting the hour freezer time) if I'm using molds that have multiple mold areas. You can also make your own rubber or silicon molds using clay and use them in Freeze N Fuse. Just don't use Sculpy with silicon rubber mold mix, it sucks the life right out of it the clay and it can't be re-used.
Mike
It's said that inside each of us is an artist trying to get out. Well mine got out... and I haven't seen him since.
If you're looking for stainless steel cookie cutters there's a lady on eBay who makes them. She also takes special orders if you want a certain shape. They stand up very well in the kiln, I've used the same ones for Christmas last year. She made ornimant shapes for me.
St
