Fixing glass disasters

So last week I shared some of my recent glass disasters. Today I have updates on a couple of the projects.

Remember this iridized bubble plate? I messed it up by fusing it on shelf paper instead of just straight in a prepared kiln shelf.

I decided to see if I could fix it by just fusing it again directly on the kiln shelf. You can see here that most everything else is on shelf paper.

It worked! Now I can slump this piece and finish it up. It's going to be a beautiful dish.
I haven't flattened out the orange plate yet to fix it. If you look in the kiln photo you see a small piece with green bubble shapes. That's a dish that I put into this firing just to see if I'll have any problems flattening the orange dish. That also worked well so I can tackle the orange dish next.

The third disaster was this quilt block suncatcher where the hanger loop got filled with glass. The solution is to grind the glass out of the hole and refire it to get a smooth edge.

Grinding glass creates a lot of heat and also a lot of glass dust and possible flying chips of glass. So there are 2 things that must be done. The first is water. The grinding surface needs to stay wet to keep it cool. The water also helps keep the dust down. With smaller pieces I like to put some water in a bin so that I can grind with the glass submerged in water.

I'm also really obsessive about eye and lung protection. I'm outfitted like this every time I'm grinding, sawing or working with glass powders.

I just needed the Dremel, a diamond bit and some patience.

This is what it looked like when I was done and it was ready to be fired again. But take a close look at the ground area. I should have noticed that it was still too thick.

Foiled again! You see, glass wants to be about 1/4" thick and that extra thickness wanted to go somewhere else and that was right back into the loop.
No worries. I know just how to fix that.