Part of being a fused glass artist is dealing with the sheer amount of scrap glass that you accumulate. Every time you cut a piece of glass, chances are there is excess material that you don't use right away. I do try to recycle and reuse as much scraps in my pieces as possible, but I still feel like I have glass coming out of my ears!
Enter: the pot melt. The idea behind a pot melt is to fill an upper chamber with scraps of fusible glass, then melt it at a high temperature so the glass liquifies and drips from the upper chamber to either a mold or kiln shelf below. Some people have made their own pot melt molds using terra cotta flower pots, but I opted to purchase this mini single hole pot melt mold from Delphi.
Following the directions from Delphi, I coated the whole mold, inside and out, with ZYP Boron Nitride Mold Release. This allows the glass to flow through the mold without sticking. I applied two thin coats, allowing the first coat to dry for about five minutes before applying the second coat.
Now on the the fun part! I wanted to include a lot of clear glass in my first pot melt to hopefully give a ton of depth to the finished pieces. So I started with a layer of clear, then added tiny bits of bright opaque colors.
I kept working in this manner, layering clear scraps and small bits of color. I also added some clear iridescent glass to see if the iridescent coating would be visible in the pot melt.
I also decided to incorporate some glass frit, as I had a mixture already made with similar colors. I wasn't sure how any of these colors would look together in a pot melt, but that's why we experiment!
Here is the mold all filled and ready to go into the kiln. I was wary of using too much glass, as there was a note in Delphi's instructions to keep all glass within the bowl portion of the mold, otherwise you could risk glass running down the outside of the mold. Some of the clear scrap had sharpie on it, I was assuming it would burn off like in any other project.
