Amazing Art Glass Catalog

I found the most amazing art glass catalog recently. There are so many fantastic color pictures I cannot include them all here. It is the International Art Glass Catalogue by National Ornamental Glass Manufacturers Association of the United States and Canada. It was published in 1914. These are just the color pictures I liked. There was also lots of clear leaded glass and beveled glass designs I am not including.

First Batch of Fired Tiles

The first batch of fired tile is back. These definitely look handmade. LOL

It is apparently easy to get a small bit of something embedded in the glaze that isn't visible during the glazing process but shows up during firing and ruins the tile. My "failure" pile is pretty large, though we may use a few of them in the row of accent tiles near the ceiling. (My standards may possibly be too high; Jeff considers most of these acceptable.)

 Here's a close up of the worst one.

Tile Nearly Finished

I finally gave up waiting on my tile order for the properly sized tiles. I have a deadline I'm trying to meet and it wasn't looking likely if I waited. So, on Friday I returned to Georgie's and just bought larger size tiles and Jeff cut them down for me. I spent most of day working on glazing tile.

My process this time was much better than last time. I put the tiles on baking sheets lined with foil. And I found if I cycled the full sheets thru the oven at a low temp (150º) they dried very quickly which really sped up the process.

I am nearly finished with the glazing, and I hope to have them all done by this afternoon.

Embroidery Book 1909

I ran across a 1909 embroidery book by Grace Christie a while back but I guess I forgot to share it. It has a bunch of attractive color plates; I'm not including them all. If you want to download the book from archive.org, you can find it here.

A Broad Border

A Doyley (Doili)

A Cushion Cover

Leaded Glass Pattern

In typical fashion, I am flitting around my different projects. Last night found me playing with Corel Draw. I really need to learn how to use a photo editor so I can make patterns for making tile, leaded glass and/or stencils. I have a pretty old version I bought about 5 years ago, but it still does the job well enough for my needs.

This is the leaded glass panel I was considering for our front door.

Tonight (or rather last night by the time I got this finished) I managed to draw it out in Corel Draw. I had to extend the height so it would fit in our door. It is nice that CorelDraw can print out this large design across multiple pages so I don't have to pay extra to have it printed on a plotter.

I still have a lot to learn, but this project went pretty well.

Update: And for the record, I also tried making this pattern in SketchUp. In the old Google days of SketchUp it would have been pretty easy to make this pattern, but the new company that owns SketchUp has stripped nearly every worthwhile feature out of the free version (SketchUp Maker). Since I cannot justify paying $700 for the pro version, I guess my SketchUp days are over. I may eventually spring for another CAD program if I can find a good value, but I'll make due with other programs for now.

William Morris Art Glass 1910

I've been poking around antique catalogs again. This time I found a 1910 catalog from William Morris. It contains metalwork and art glass and if you'd like to download the catalog, you can find it here.

Tile Glazing

Today was all about glazing tile. We are still in the process of making the decorative tiles for our bathroom. Georgie's didn't sell thick 2x2 bisque tiles, so we bought 2x6 tiles and cut them down. Because we actually wanted them to be true 2x2, we didn't get 3 tiles from each of them. Anyway, Barrett was nice enough to let us borrow his tile saw to cut down the bisque tiles.

Then I lightly sanded the sharp edges with leftover sandpaper from my woodwork sanding.

Bisque tiles laid out for glazing

Bisque tiles with 3 coats of glaze

I used a fan brush and a small dish to apply 3 coats of glaze with a bit of drying time between coats. I also rotated the direction I applied the glaze between coats to hopefully minimize the brush marks. (I don't really recommend styrofoam as a work surface. I just used it because it would protect the table and I didn't care if it got glaze on it because it was en route to the garbage.)

I am still awaiting an order of 160 6"x½" tiles before I can declare this project finished.