Cleaning glass and maintaining the magic
We prep all of our hand blown glass plates for the kiln by washing them off, making sure to get debris and fingerprints off because our fingerprints have oil in them which will permanently fire to the surface. We use a special glass cleaning powder that is clean enough for optical applications, which means it is certainly clean enough to go into our kiln. This cleaning powder becomes very slippery during the cleaning process so we have to be really careful when handling the plates!
This is a fairly meditative part of the process...but a really important one that maintains the magic of the shiny blown glass.
After a rinse, our plates will take a ride in the kiln to slump flat in preparation for a trip to the waterjet where they will be cut into our sophisticated geometric jewelry shapes like the ones you see below!
