Today we had an Archaeology Open Day which was surprisingly quiet. Consequently I had quite a bit of free time in the lab on my own. I had also had about five blue glass bottles cluttering up my office for what seemed like ages, and so I added two and two together and came up with a trug of blue glass cullet.

This wasn’t completely out of the blue (pardon the pun). My colleague in Geography, Holly, is in charge of a small furnace and we have discussed the possibility of melting my glass bottles to produce a slab of glass, and Tuesday next week may be the opportunity to do so. However, based upon previous experience I needed a method of stopping the melted glass block adhering to the clay mould. Enter Potters Aluminium Kiln Wash.

The experiment next week is to use the clay mould given to me by Alice la Porta, and use the Potters Aluminium Kiln Wash to form a layer between the mould and the glass cullet to be melted in the furnace. Holly is going to be in charge of times and temperatures, I will be in charge of keeping my fingers crossed.

This is the mould Alice gave me, let’s see how it goes…