New Bowl Mold for Glass

We got a few new molds for slumping glass. One of them is for a larger, steep sided bowl. It's a little more challenging to use than our other molds. Here's my first attempt at using it.

The mold instructions say to peek at it during the firing schedule's high temperature hold time. One of the challenges with this mold is that the sides are so steep, the glass starts to slide down them towards the bottom very quickly. You can see in the picture above that the bowl has started to shrink to the bottom. The edges of the glass have pulled away from the mold by about an inch. So I think I left it at that high temperature hold for too long. At this point there was still 15 minutes of that hold time left, but I cancelled the firing and started the cool down process.

Here's the finished bowl. It has a few issues. The pictures don't show it, but the sides of the bowl are thicker than normal. You can see, however, that the outside edge of the bowl came out irregular instead of circular. Also, the bottom of the bowl has a texture to it. All of those issues were caused by the glass sliding down the edge of the mold.

Even with all those issues, I like it! I love the glass that I used. It looks like someone spilled ink into water then froze it into glass. I also like the texture on the bottom of the bowl. But all those issues mean you won't see it in our Etsy shop. Looks like I have a new fruit bowl!