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Glass Bevel Book
By Christine Cox
August 2006
Inspiration doesn’t
necessarily come with all the knowledge necessary to achieve the
artistic goal. In fact, living as an artist could be called one long
experiment and I like to think of my skills as never-ending works in
progress. This was brought painfully clear to me recently when I decided
to make 2 books with
Beveled
Glass covers as swap projects.
This adventure took
place during and after unexpected surgeries on both feet. A significant
component of this story is that for the entire making of these 2 books I
was either confined to a chair with my feet up or walking with some
combination of “walking boot” (from the Greek “plastic vise to keep
one’s foot immobilized”) and crutches. Every trip upstairs to the studio
was planned in advance like a military operation; lists were made,
routes planned, pain pills swallowed.
Was the project ever
cut back to accommodate my physical limitations, uh, no. That isn’t in
my personality profile. In fact, the recipients of the 2 books were
receiving increasingly plaintive emails that all boiled down to one
message, “The books can be on time or well-made. You choose.” That
doesn’t mean that the guilt-o-meter wasn’t pegged during the final
weeks.
One of the first
missions on any bookbinding project is to decide how to attach the text
pages to the covers. I made myself a template and proceeded to drill 4
holes into 2 beveled pieces of glass (known simply as “bevels”). Until
this time, drilling glass had made this metalsmith/bookbinder just a
little nervous. By now I’ve drilled so many holes in glass that bottles
and windows quake in my presence.
I knew that the edges
of the holes would cut the
Thread so I pondered different ways to
protect it. This turned out to be the pivotal problem of the project. My
first solution was to put an
Eyelet into each hole. This seemed like a
great idea to me, one that had worked on countless metal books that I
had made through the years. It was tough because the bevel, by
definition, had a sloped surface and naturally I wanted the row of
sewing holes to be lined up like little soldiers down one long beveled
edge. I worked very slowly and carefully at installing the first eyelet.
It worked, but the next eyelet didn’t go as well. As I tried to flatten
it, the eyelet defied me, argued with me, stood up where I wanted it to
lay down, and then finally the glass couldn’t take the stress and
shattered.
Undeterred, and with
the flush of my recent successful eyelet installation I got out another
bevel, marked and drilled the holes and then tried another eyelet. And
broke the glass.
Three broken bevels
later, I thought that perhaps there was a better solution.
I think it was at this
point that I began talking to myself, “Christine, you can do this.
You’ve had problems worse than this in the past and you have every tool
known to woman, so there must be a better way.” I tried grinding the
edges of the holes with a bullet shaped grinding accessory on my flex-shaft. It wasn’t nearly fine enough and I didn’t have time to buy a
finer accessory (or so I thought, eventually this project took over 2
months to complete), so I tried dabbing that plastic-dip tool handle
protector black, goopy, messy, yucky, stinky stuff (Plasti-Dip) onto the edges of the
holes. This dripped right through the holes and just made a mess all
over my table. Reject.
“Think outside the
box.” If I couldn’t make the glass smoother, could I somehow protect the
thread? I bought some shrink tubing from Radio Shack with the thought
that I would shrink it onto the thread, and then I thought about the
bits of plastic that would show. Reject.
I tried dabbing some
PVA into the holes but when it dried I was able to pull it right back
out. Reject. {{sigh}}
How about using my bead
blaster to etch the holes smooth? Bead blasting is great fun and I seek
out reasons to use the blasting cabinet. You put your piece of glass
into a cabinet, lock the door, don gloves that look like they
are straight out of a science fiction film and then shoot super fine
glass beads out of a gun. It has the gritty (if you’ll pardon the pun)
feel of boring -- by sheer force -- through a “fragile” piece of glass and
yet it has a “clean-room” feel that makes you think of a NASA lens
grinding laboratory.
Knowing that I could
use alphabet stickers as a resist, I dug up some old ones that I had
around and spelled out my initials and the date on the back cover of
what would hopefully someday become a book.
Let me say, in my own
defense, that I’d only used my bead blaster on metal before so I didn’t
realize how much more abrasion and time are necessary for etching glass.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
I blasted right through
the stickers that I’d used as a resist. After removing the -- mostly
non-existent -- remains of the stickers I saw that rather than saying “C
Cox ’06,” the glass just looked mottled, though it did look like it might
have had a letter or two on it at some point. Reject.
It was at this point
that I realized that I was in over my head.
My friend Helen
Wilkinson -- who is a wonderful glass artist -- had been teaching me how to use my new kiln. Helen’s specialty
is slumping and fusing glass so we had been making little fused bowls
and plates. I loved the look of the rounded, fused edges of the items
we’d made, and we thought that I could blunt (as I later learned it was
called) the edges of the glass.
As if a new technique and a pending
deadline weren’t enough, no one I talked to had ever tried blunting a
bevel in a kiln. Every type of glass reacts to the heat differently and
no one seemed to know exactly what type a bevel was made from. I tried
asking every artist or instructor I thought might know. I even asked the
distributor of the bevels. I did get lots of advice about protecting my
kiln from any glass that might pop or roll onto its floor. I hadn’t
thought of that. Great, something else to worry about.
I drilled holes in more
bevels (I was really going through the
Diamond Drill Bits at this point)
and then Helen and I started experimenting with the exact
ramp/temperature/time combination that would yield blunted edges and
rounded, yet still open, holes. After a week of experiments, a
near-disaster and several calls to the manufacturer of my kiln, I found
that I had -- not the covers I needed to sew a book -- but a bad
thermocouple in the new kiln. Now all my time/temp experiment results
were suspect.
A week later, after
installing the new thermocouple, I was ready to get back to work. I
drilled another bevel and fired it using the original time/temp
parameters. They worked. Finally, a break! (Don't say "break")
At last I was ready to
make sets of matching book covers and to sew the books. Armed with the
knowledge of which drill bit and method I prefer for
drilling glass
(1/8” diamond core on a drill press),
which stickers to use for the bead blasting resist (good quality, heavy
vinyl ones) and the right ramp/temp/hold rates for blunting glass bevels
(every kiln is different but my Paragon SC3 kiln solution was
1500/1500/.25), I started again.
An experimental artist
is always out on the edge of what has been done before. Sometimes it can
be painful or expensive or uncomfortable, but it has to be done.
Personally, I find it thrilling.
Now, I’ve got this new
idea for a wooden book cover with a glass and PMC inlay . . .
Note: After I wrote this article I made the book I wanted.
Update 7/08: Here is another glass bevel
book I made
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