Working with Powders to Make Fused Glass Votives

In my prior post, I shared how I made flower plates using clear glass and powders.  The process for making the votives is pretty similar with a couple of adjustments, the main one is that the technique calls for draping rather than slumping. 

As mentioned, I'm on a quest to use up my excess scrap glass.  As I have smaller pieces than what I used for the flower plates, I decided to make petal votives.  I cut out my leaf or petal pattern based on the size of the glass - for this project, I had 3 sizes of petals.  Then I applied the excess powder from the flower plates, which was really a blend of all the colors that I used previously grouped by primary color (e.g. red, green, blue).  After these are fired, instead of the colored dots, I used clear ones to create a design.

The dots are made from clear frit that I fused to 1500 with a 45 minute hold.  I picked out similar sized dots to create a design on the petal and put these back into the kiln to tack fuse before they were draped onto stainless steel votive cups that have been kilnwashed.  The kilnwash needs to be applied while the stainless steel is hot.  What I do is to heat them with a blow dryer but you can also heat them in the kiln to 500 degree and then apply the kilnwash.

The draping process takes a lot longer than slumping as you want to have a uniform drape.  I could have tried something faster as these are small and have open spaces but went with something conservative (100 degrees/hr to 1225) as I didn't want to use up kiln time to test out a different schedule.  And, when I opened the kiln, I was very happy with the outcome for the most part.  Some of them didn't drape evenly, which was probably a result of not paying more attention when I tack fused them together.  I really like the look of the clear dots.  Let me know what you think.