I wanted to make my own glass tesserae for a new mosaic. The tesserae are the pieces that you mosaic to your substrate or board. I have been working with Orsoni smalti in the direct method with no grout. The smalti I purchase from Italy is usually about 5/8" x 3/8" x 1/4" but does vary in size because it is handmade. Orsoni uses a large chopping machine to fracture the glass and then I place the cut side facing up in my mosaics. Here is the chopping machine my amazing husband made using my hardie and hammer so my arm wouldn't get tired!
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| A diy homemade smalti chopping machine |
Smalti starts as a round slab of opaque glass called a pizza. I can buy lots of solid colors, but not any streaky tessera. So my first step was to melt some scrap Bullseye glass into my own streaky glass pizzas using a pot melt techique in my kiln.
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| My kiln set-up to make pot melts. |
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| Pot melt pizzas from scrap Bullseye Glass |
The finished glass pizzas are beautiful and can be used in other fused glass projects, but these are for mosaics. To chop up my glass pizzas, I used my very own smalti chopping machine. Here is a video of it in use, I think it really works phenomenally well.
I took the time to chop up some streaky red, some green and a bit of blue. I am so happy with the results! I should note that the streaky glass did not always break square to the surface like the purchased Orsoni. This could be because I made the pizzas out of a different type of glass or maybe because the pizza is made of many different colors running at different angles to the surface. I'm not sure but I have so much glass made that I can pick and choose the pieces I use.
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| Home made streaky red glass smalti |
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| Home made streaky green glass smalti |
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| Home made streaky blue glass smalti |
Now to make some mosaics! Maybe a landscape with water flowing across or a field of trees in shades of green.
Sharon Warren Glass | sharonwarrenglass | sharonwarrenglass.com | FluttterByButterfly | Sharon Warren Glass Artist
