Also, thank you in general for all your helpful advice here, and for your phenomenal books! I just bought all three, and I recently switched to using your firing schedule for Bronzclay–which pretty much changed my results from close to zero to almost 100 percent. What a difference. (Then I started using the Fastfire Bronzclay I had lying around, but kept to your schedule, and I might as well be firing silver now. Easy perfection!)

And the store is Stained Glass Garden, down on 4th Street. (I live in Davis–I plan to sign up for one of your six-week classes at some point.)

Bronze will always suffer from open air firing, a lot more than copper. Is it possible to bury just the metal in carbon while you are firing, leaving only the glass in the air? As to your other question, I really don’t know much about glass. I hope whoever reads it can help. What store in Berkeley was it?

1)When I use the bronze clay, the open firing seems to leave it with a deposit of copper on the outer layer of the metal, and although it’s mostly removable after an extraordinary amount of vigorous scrubbing with a brass brush, the metal is still left with a rosy look rather than a golden one. It’s not ugly exactly, but if I’d wanted to use copper, I’d have used copper, you know? Any idea how to avoid this, or is it just a feature of open firing the bronze? I’m considering coating the pieces with a boric acid/water solution before trying it again–not so much to avoid the fire scale, which is pickle-able, but to see if it curtails the copper issue. (And to be clear–the copper coating is definitely a problem that’s happening in the firing, NOT in my pickling. There’s no contamination in my pickle.)

2)The second problem is one I’ve had continuously with the glass. I fuse the pieces, and I’m annealing them properly. But at some point, usually a day or two after they’re fired, the glass breaks–a sheer break in half, with the top and bottom halves separating cleanly from one another. The folks at the glass store in Berkeley tell me this isn’t something they recognize–if the pieces weren’t annealed properly, they say they’d be shattering, rather than cleaving in two this way. When I was setting pre-fused pieces into raw silver clay, I thought perhaps the shrinkage around the glass was causing too much pressure on the cab, but now I’m fusing the glass straight into the fully sintered setting–so I don’t think pressure is the issue. If anyone has ideas, I’d be so grateful to hear them.

It might work. If the copper turns red, it’s really easy to buff it to its natural color. In any case, the oxidation is only on the surface since the firing is not that long. I’d love to see what you do with it!

Hadar