The Manufacturing Process

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All of our pieces start out their lives as dreams and ideas. One the design is finalised the creative process begins. 

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Sheets of glass are marked out and hand cut into the required shapes. This process alone can take many hours depending on the intricacy of the piece. They are then painstakingly arranged and fired in a kiln at temperatures between 650 and 820 degrees centigrade. It's not just as simple as putting them in to fire and walking away, the kiln must be programmed for the required size and thickness of the project inside, the type of glass must be taken into consideration as different colours and opacities behave differently when heated, and it is often necessary to perform a number of visual checks on a piece during the firing.

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Firing takes from around 8 hours up to 20+ hours. Firstly taking the temperature up in stages to avoid shocking and cracking the glass, holding at it's required process temperature and then slowly cooling, holding it at various temperatures on the way back down to allow the crystalline structure of the glass to settle itself - a process known as annealing. Without this controlled cooling, the glass would crack, either on opening the kiln or at any point afterwards, sometimes even years later.

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Most pieces take more than one firing, a typical piece would take an initial firing to meld the glass together, a second one to add detail and texture (in most cases the detail added will have already been fired separately) and a third and final firing to shape the piece to its desired form. Due to this, even the simplest piece can take a number of days to complete.

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We use the highest quality glass from Bullseye Glass. Glass is never mixed and matched as this would compromise the integrity of the finished piece. All glass is sourced from the same manufacturer, be it in sheet form, which is how most of our pieces begin life, or as powder, frit or canes.

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