This is another one of my learn-it-yourself fusing experiments. I wanted to use wire in a tile as a border and for detailing. So, I came up with a simple design of a chick holding a heart.
For the "border" experiment, I created a wire outline of a heart and filled it up with coarse frit. For "detailing" experiment, I decided to give my chick wire feet. I positioned my glass and fired up the baby kiln. It all looked good when the glass heated up, except the chick has melted a bit more into the background than I wanted it to. So, I turned the kiln off and left it to cool overnight.
In the morning, however, I found a small crack running diagonally through the tile, and it pretty much broke in half in my hand. Also, I saw a lot of small fractures around the "toes" - I guess baby kiln cools down way too fast, and that caused metal and glass to cool at different pace and resulted in the crack.
My second fusing with wire experiment was much simpler. I decided to try to simply fuse wire not on top of a piece of glass but in between of two pieces.
I came up with a 3D stand-up bird design where bird's wire feet, "hair" and the base of the tail were fused between two pieces of glass.
This little experiment went down just fine, and all five pieces of wire were set firmly between two pieces of glass. I finished the bird with a drawn-on scroll design and added a feather tail. The yellow birdie stands quire firmly on its wire feet.