Incorporating Glass into Precious Metal Clay

Incorporating glass into Precious Metal Clay can turn a good piece into a stunning piece. I am not going to teach you how to fuse glass in this blog, but if you are looking for glass to fuse, and instruction books, great places to look are Amazon and Blick. You can fuse glass in your PMC kiln. Glass kilns are approximately the same size, and PMC and fusing glass are great partners.

Remember that you need to use low fire PMC3 when combining glass and PMC. PMC3 was formulated to fire at a temperature low enough not to melt glass.

Create your piece from Precious Metal Clay the way you normally would, embed your fused glass into the raw clay, then fire at the lowest temperature possible.

Because of the glass, the kiln needs to ramp up very slowly, and cool slowly as well. Glass has unique properties that cause it to go into temperature shock if you heat or cool it too rapidly. The shock causes cracks or breakage in the glass. Let your piece cool inside the kiln overnight. Do not pull it out early. The cooling process is just as important as the heating process.

You can wrap PMC around the fused glass or you can create a bezel for it.  The best practice is to have a hole or open area behind the glass to let the light shine all the way through front to back.