Silver leaf/foil

[grozier]

I have a project where my client wants silver leaf or foil fused between two layers of clear glass. They do not want any yellowing but prefer the silver color retained throughout. Questions, should I use silver leaf or silver foil? I use Bullseye Glass. Are my chances better if I use the Crystal Clear versus TEKTA? Are the results heat sensitive? I would normally fire to tack fuse around 1390 degrees. Thanks again for all of your help.

[Kevin Midgley]

CBS silver dichro will be what they really want if they see it.
Hope you haven't quoted you can do the job cheaply.
If regular silver gets loose in your kiln, you'll be paying for that oops for a long time.
The same goes for handling it in your studio.

[Bert Weiss]

platinum lustre works as well. I never used palladium lustre, that might work also. Silver colored mica is another one.

[Eric Baker]

@ Kevin

I'd heard of yellow staining when silver corrupts kiln shelves. Are there other concerns when in the studio environment also, other than just being messy to work with? (Full disclosure, I've not worked with either leaf or foil as an inclusion, so the question may seem silly and the answer is obvious, though I'm unaware of it...)

Warm regards,

Eric

[Morganica]

If they have to use foil, try palladium or platinum foil, if you can find it. SEP used to carry it. Or, believe it or not, gold foil can sometimes look more like silver than silver.

But I'd agree, if your clients don't just insist on foil, silver lustres, micas or dichro would probably give a more consistent silver look.

Regular BE clear vs. BE crystal clear (1401, probably the only BE color number I reliably remember) seems to be a matter of personal color sense. To me, regular clear muddies any color it's mixed with/placed over, whether it's frit or sheet. I always use 1401 unless I want to dull the colors.

I'm probably in the minority, though, and I suspect that most people can't tell the difference unless they've spent a lot of time comparing the two.

[StaceyG]

Can you fuse it uncapped? It shouldn't turn yellow that way.

[Bert Weiss]

Can you fuse it uncapped? It shouldn't turn yellow that way.

Yellow is a matter of temperature. Silver stains glass yellow. As Kevin said, it also sticks to things like kiln shelves and then stains any glass it comes in to hot contact with down the road, over and over. In the stained glass painting world, silver stain is fired on a thick bed of whiting to 1250ºF or less. The whiting is tossed. Whiting doesn't like to get much hotter, maybe 1300, but beyond that you will get white scum. Whiting (calcium carbonate) is much cheaper than kilnwash, so tossing it is no big deal.

[Valerie Adams]

I recently did my first experiment with fine silver wire inclusions. I bent silver wire into heart shapes and placed them on 1215 Striker Pink, then capped with Tekta. The hearts were small--about 1/2" tall--and completely encased in glass (at least1" of glass all the way around each heart). I knew silver had the potential to stain my shelf so I placed the hearts with lots of glass surrounding them so any fumes wouldn't stain my shelf.

The shelf looked fine after firing, but the next piece I fired was 0126, Spring Green opal. It had heart-shaped stains on the bottom of it, which amazed me.

How did the silver bleed through the Striker Pink to contaminate the shelf? I had to fire the kiln about 4-5 times before the stain stopped transferring to glass.

[Don Burt]

I recently did my first experiment with fine silver wire inclusions. I bent silver wire into heart shapes and placed them on 1215 Striker Pink, then capped with Tekta. The hearts were small--about 1/2" tall--and completely encased in glass (at least1" of glass all the way around each heart). I knew silver had the potential to stain my shelf so I placed the hearts with lots of glass surrounding them so any fumes wouldn't stain my shelf.

The shelf looked fine after firing, but the next piece I fired was 0126, Spring Green opal. It had heart-shaped stains on the bottom of it, which amazed me.

How did the silver bleed through the Striker Pink to contaminate the shelf? I had to fire the kiln about 4-5 times before the stain stopped transferring to glass.

So in effect the silver or some of its ions dropped straight down through your bottom layer of glass into the kiln shelf , with enough residual silver that the shelf stained the next project, and retained the heart shape? thats pretty cool, really.

[Morganica]

I recently did my first experiment with fine silver wire inclusions. I bent silver wire into heart shapes and placed them on 1215 Striker Pink, then capped with Tekta. The hearts were small--about 1/2" tall--and completely encased in glass (at least1" of glass all the way around each heart). I knew silver had the potential to stain my shelf so I placed the hearts with lots of glass surrounding them so any fumes wouldn't stain my shelf.

The shelf looked fine after firing, but the next piece I fired was 0126, Spring Green opal. It had heart-shaped stains on the bottom of it, which amazed me.

How did the silver bleed through the Striker Pink to contaminate the shelf? I had to fire the kiln about 4-5 times before the stain stopped transferring to glass.

There has gotta be a way to exploit that-- in effect, you're printing on glass....