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Hi all,
Does anyone think this is viable? I want to make some flowers - petals and leaves - using the fossil vitra technique - sort of. I will put the leaves on the paper, sift the powder on top of the leaves and petals, slide them over to a clean sheet of thin fire, and full fuse without adding any glass on top. My hope is that they will end up being thin powder wafers that actually look like leaves and petals that I can incorporate by tack fusing on a base layer. Or do you think, they'll just end up as blobs. Any advice?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Patty

It might. I see a bunch of issues you'd need to overcome, but you might wind up making something great in the process. That's the fun of experimenting.

First, your plant parts probably won't hold enough powder to make wafers that can hold their integrity-they might be TOO thin. And second, if you could get enough powder on the plant you're using (or bug or seed or whatever), you'd have to get it to the right spot in the kiln, powder intact, which might be tough.

You can solve both with light sprays of adhesive directly on the plant, then sift the powder on. Let it dry, spray lightly again, and sift on some more. I use that technique with quilt basting spray to coat glass that I then powder. You can build up surprisingly thick layers that way.

The other problems might be harder to solve. When organics burn off in the kiln they're liable to move, which could jostle the powder. Any adhesive you use to solve the first two problems will be gone by this stage, so that won't help.

And even if the organics don't cause the powder to shift, when they're gone the powder will drop straight down to the kilnshelf. So you'll mostly wind up with a silhouette of the plant in powder. It might be easier to put the plant in a strong light, trace its silhouette on some cardstock, cut it out and use it as a sifting template.

But give it a shot. Even if you don't get plant-shaped powder wafers you might come up with something really interesting.