hello so today we're going to be looking at how to make a lovely round glass cabochon which gets fired in the kiln so you've not got a kiln and obviously this won't be the most useful demo for you anybody there's a glass maker out there or has access to a kill this is a fantastic option for making your own jewelry she make you a really unusual sparkly stones I use a special glass called dichroic which is this one here it's a two-tone iridescent glass that NASA originally developed surprisingly enough it has two or three colors which it reflects and transmits and this one is copper cyan as you can see it's a lovely coppery term which is then transmitted into a aqua blue as well and you can layer this and with various glass and i layer it with bullseye and these are my opaque bullseye colors okay I've got a green lit and a black and we can get transparent bullseye it looks rather nice with that as well sometimes I just layer the dichroic with a layer of clear on top so I get these gorgeous translucent stones as well which really shows the light and you can actually see and hearing that I've made here how well they're translucent stones work now as a pair because they like to go straight through okay so to get started what you need to know about glass and is firstly how to cut it now this is the bit that most people have a little bit of trouble with I would say staff bigger it's like cutting bigger pieces of glass if you can because it makes it easier for you and I use a glass cut until it's got a nice dip in it as you can see which I put my finger into like this and he was I can push it but the pressure into the tip of the roller now at the tip here you'll see I have a nice little wheel that goes round it's not sharp perfectly safe I use this for schoolchildren rather a lot so what a tile cutter will do you'll get more precision this is German brand I want you to think is how you pronounce it and there's various cutters in the market a lot of them are oiled I personally prefer to work with a drag because it's less before me and then in order to hold my rule less still on the glass I tend to use a ruler that's got nice and rubber base to it stops it slipping around so I'm just gonna cut myself a nice little square so to get the round stones I have to work with square shapes okay now you could share that lovely goes through some people sometimes that lovely crack okay and then I have breaking pliers here which again I get I get these from one glass along with all my glass and other tools these have a lying on top which you then match up with a line that you've just scored in your glass and you should get should get much cleaner cut okay just like that and once you get used to doing because don't do a yeah as I do and now would regard to the cutting you watch this carefully I tipped my cat sir I do not slide it flush with a glass i tilted about 45 degrees and then I pressed with one long even stroke right to the end even pressure all the way and I can't emphasize that enough because people tend to start with a lot of pressure then ease off and then when you break the glass it just breaks and evenly if you've got a good enough cat and you work with two mill glass which is what I you do not three mill then you can easily break it with your fingers if it's a good enough cat not then I recommend that for beginners okay so the way it works is you create square stones and as long as you use um two to four layers at least in your stone it and as long as you fire it on what I call a full fuse which is up to 800 degrees Celsius you should then get stone the Rams off perfectly now you get a more rigid square shape if you can set your kiln to a temperature below that there's also something that we call a soak time which is the amount of time that you leave the stones at the very top temperature so for example when I reach 800 degree Celsius in my kiln and then give these a soak time of between 10 and 20 minutes usually I set to about 15 to be safe it does depend on how many layers you've got and it does depend on your kiln so it's something you have to play around with and this here's got two layers of glass just clear glass and dichroic does this one will have three so here you've got the green glass the dichroic and then a top layer of clear so and full of fumes firemen will work on both so they have got my black glass and now I'm going to cut into my dichroic now this is where you have a decision if you want to show the edges as I have here okay so you see the color behind not just use the background color something that influences and affect the dichroic color in the middle which it can do if you actually want to see the green then you obviously or the black in this case you obviously want to cut your stone your glass sorry so that a smaller piece of dichroic in the middle like this now if you go too small when you then balance your piece of clear glass on top what I find often happens is that if there's a slight dip it slides slightly in the kiln you end up with a bit of an uneven stone okay and you can see here what's happened on that one okay it's just slits like it's not the end of the world but I would recommend you and you leave a slight boarder and don't go for a very tiny piece in the middle because it just leaves it a bit wobbly and it's Prohm just just sliding and melting in one direction more than the other rather than nice even melt as I call that now this is Alma's glue okay so glass glue that I purchase again from the glass I use this but to be honest you could use most PVA Clues okay just a little daft is all you need it does melt away so if he was far too much of it I let it dry a lot before you fire you will find you might have a little skeleton pattern there but it's very rare that I find that happens so just kind of pray I think once you have your stone at this stage what I'd recommend you've got time to joke but if you I've got the time I would leave that settled so it's not sliding about okay now the top layer blast you can use a three mil which again gives you an even more guaranteed rounded shape because it's stiff care for thicker and higher you stack the more rounded your stone becomes because what happens is all the layers from the top like to melt down and around to meet each other um-um includes two mil or three mil on top to Miller's office is far easier to cut through okay on this occasion I'm just going to pick my two mil okay now I get asked this by students you can I recommend cutting the top piece just a fraction bigger so the clear glass has got more volume a glass to sort of Bend and curve around when it melts to meet the bottom it's not a total necessity but if you're looking to capture that colored border around you don't want the black glass at the bottom coming up to meet the clear glass too much so I would leave about M 2 mil and all the way around and slightly bigger and when you do go anyplace some people recommend there's a little trick where they say to really wet try and get this in good sight for you without you slipping around too much so that your piece your top piece is actually as an opposite angle like that I actually glue mine okay so that it's directly above a square like this I find I get a round result no matter which that I do but you will see different videos different blogs I recommend that the top layer goes at the opposite like okay and there is a good for you behind that and but like I said doesn't seem to affect my results too greatly as long as you've cut your pieces to exact squares you will not have a problem okay so just as you can see I've got my square piece of glass my talk in the middle I'm going to let that dry a little bit and then it's ready to go in the color well I do put it into my paint and glass will resist ceramics okay that's how we sometimes create tunnels and glasses by using ceramic okay so I will show you the results and as soon as the glasses I've killed and just to point out if you do want to make it completely clear stone and all you to do is miss a background layer here so if you wanted to create something like this and if you are doing that I would recommend a three mil bullseye not two mil balls likely a glass just because the thicker it is the more round off and if you've only got two layers it's more likely to stay a square shape okay three layers is what I would recommend for a really round stone I mean you get some quite exciting results I make rings okay I use my cabouchins rings you can enclose them in things and if you are good at silversmiths and obviously you can create your own silver surround pendants and so if you have access to a kill obviously have a go if not you can actually buy glass captures from me and they will be going on my website and also and I do put them on eBay as well now there are other people who also sell glass captions on Etsy HoneyBaked but if you have got one then do give this a go because glass is a beautiful thing right I will see you shortly with the results okay so here's our transformation just look at that okay you gets beautifully rounded off stone you get your lovely sparkly dichroic in the middle there and I've see this stone I didn't put the exact square and I just put like a little fragment a dichroic in which is why slightly more odd shape in the middle and flat on the back so you can glue and your stone into different jewelry pieces and what I would say to is about 12 to 14 - return by 10 this one and it really doesn't affect the appearance that's still very much at all and obviously with this one I've used it perfectly even square piece of dichroic fragments not this particular color this is actually pink green and this year it's called red silver blue okay iris be dichroic unclear and then I've laid it on a black background you'll see the difference there between the copper color and this lovely aqua shade which I use a lot off of my business I've actually trapped a gemstone in this design which is a bit of a complicated process so well if I get enough demand for it then obviously I will include that process in one of my blogs as well but hopefully this will give you an idea how you can achieve a lovely effect with just little chakra within your competence now but I'd also like to point out visually this is quite a square stone with some lovely rounded edges so what I've done here I've still cooked or fired the stone I should say at 800 degrees Celsius but I've only given it about a five to ten minute soak time which means it's retaining its squareness ever so slightly okay so that will help you see the difference between you know how your fire and schedules can affect the shape of your stone anyway I hope you've enjoyed that and it's giving you a bit of an insight into the basics of creating your own glass stones there is a lot more to it and I will be doing that in future with you and for now do what I do and get making some gorgeous stones folks