Silver the inside of a Blown Glass Object

English Transcription of Video:

(00:10):

Hi, thanks for stopping by Angel Gilding. I'm Alix, and today we are going to be mirroring a blown glass object, in particular these beautiful blown glass pumpkins. Now as you can see, I went ahead and mirrored this piece already. I used our silver mirror, but I did some fun techniques here. You can see a little bit of it from here, but if you wanted some up close pictures, wanted a bit more detail about how I created this fun effect, then you can see that on our Instagram page. I'll be sure to link our Instagram in the description below. But for today, we're mainly going to be working with this pumpkin. We're going to be creating a silver mirror on the interior of the piece. And then if you stick around towards the end, I've got a bonus for you. We're actually going to be working with metal layers, so we're going to be creating a layered effect with our silver and our galena, and we're doing that with this pumpkin, so stay tuned to the end to see that.

(01:08):

Now I feel that the silvering process, or in general the mirroring process works really well on blown glass objects because of how thin the silver layer is that deposits, and the benefit of that is that it gets into all of the texture, all of the movements that you've created within your blown glass object and amplifies it. It really brings it to life in a very fun way, and you'll see that with our pieces today. These are beautifully blown glass pumpkins that are going to be taken to the next level by mirroring. Now, a couple of things to keep in mind when you're trying to decide if mirroring is the right process for your blown glass piece. We're going to be working with our pouring silver solutions that comes in our blown glass mirror kit, and so we're going to need to pour those to the interior of the blown glass piece.

(02:05):

So we need to have access, we need to have an opening in the blown glass piece to be able to pour those in, swirl them around, pour them out, allow it to dry, all of that. So you need to have an opening fairly big enough that you're able to do each of those steps. We do have a tip or trick towards the end that will point out about speeding up that dry time if you don't have a lot of airflow of your piece, but you do need to be able to access that inside. And then of course, if you have a piece that has a long extension to it, some long armature where the majority of it is hollow, but perhaps the end of it is solid glass, just keep in mind that that means the mirroring will not extend through the full length. It's only going to of course develop on the hollow portion of the blown glass.

(02:53):

It can't penetrate solid glass. So just a visual effect to keep in mind. And then the other thing to keep in mind is that at times when you're blowing glass, it's possible that either something within the frit that you've used or perhaps the pipe that you're blowing could deposit something within the glass itself that can have an effect on mirroring. Now I've seen this with old blow pipes where there's some iron flagger iron residue that can have an effect on the mirroring and it can actually be a really beautiful effect, but it could also be discouraging if it's not something that you're prepared for. So if you do the mirroring process and you're getting a result that you're just not quite sure about, I would recommend snapping a picture of it and sending that to us. And we can help you to figure out if maybe something went wrong within the mirroring process or if there's something embedded within the mirror or embedded within the glass itself that the mirror is showing. Sometimes it may not be visible in the glass until it's mirrored because of course mirroring is going to amplify effects of the glass. But without further ado, let's delve into our project of silvering, our blown glass pumpkin.

(04:15):

To start off here, we are going to be measuring our chemicals so that we have those ready for us. First up is our tin for silver. Tin for silver is always going to be concentrated and we want to mix up fresh daily. The diluted chemicals are good for about six to eight hours, so you do want to mix up fresh for each day that you use them, and that's one milliliter of the concentrate with one ounce of distilled water and you want to estimate about 45 milliliters per square foot. So I'm just using my 10 mil cylinder there and once I pour it into my 16 ounce cup, I like to rinse out the 10 mil cylinder and also use that water for the diluting. So that's just an extra step saved there by rinsing it out. And then I can measure it with my 16 ounce cup there.

(05:08):

Once again, the distilled water, once I've got my tin diluted and ready to go, I can put that to the side and then move on to the silvering chemicals. These are the silver pouring silver solutions that are ready to use and they're in my MEC bottle, which makes the measuring pretty easy there. I'm going to use 15 milliliters of each of the solutions. So that's going to cover about a square foot, and we do have our F a Q page on our website that helps to calculate the area, which can be helpful for some of these tricky blown glass pieces. So you want to make sure you have equal portions of those. Moving right along to cleaning, we're going to be using our liquid cleaner and I'm going to dilute it there with just some hot tap water, most blown glass pieces you can't really get in there and scrub.

(06:06):

So this is how we clean our piece. You just get that diluted cleaner, pour it in there and swirl it around. Now even if your piece is freshly blown, we do recommend that you always take the time and do cleaning and rinsing are very important steps in any mirroring process because you want to make sure that that surface is chemically clean so that the silver can deposit properly on the glass surface. So we're going to take our time clean that wall. This initial rinse is going to be done with the regular warm tap water getting all throughout that piece.

(06:50):

Once I've done my initial rinse there, I'm going to do my final rinse here with distilled water, and then we're going to be using distilled water from here on out. Once again, taking time to rinse it really well. I've got to the side there, my waist bucket. Now this is just the spent water from the rinsing, so technically that can go down the regular drain, but just happen to have that there. Now I do need to seal off the opening. I've got latex film, evite foam. Those are the two different options that come in the blown glass kit, and that's going to help seal the opening. As you'll see in just a moment, I opted for the evite foam and I've actually supported it here by taping it onto this acrylic sheet. And as you can see, that's going to help me to cover up that opening so that I can swirl the piece and not have the chemicals just pour out. First off is the tin for silver, so I pour that into the vessel.

(07:50):

I'm going to set my timer, and then I want to gently rock that around the surface for at least 30 seconds. Sometimes if you have a more complex piece, you might find that you need a bit more than 30 seconds, and that's okay. 30 seconds is kind of the minimum. You want to just make sure that the chemicals fully contact the piece and that they're able to flow over the glass so that you can form that invisible tin layer. Once that's done, turn off your timer and then rinse. You want to rinse your tin for silver very, very well to your time. Any excess tin for silver here is going to cause an issue, so you want to take the time to rinse that really well. And I also rinse off the foam because of course that had tin for silver on it too. So rinse, rinse, and rinse again.

(08:43):

Now I can move on to the silvering process. As you recall, we've got those measured. So I'm going to combine in this one cup here, the pouring silver solution and the pouring silver activator. Now I like to combine these two in one cup and then you'll see I'm going to put the pouring silver reducer in another cup. That's not absolutely critical, but the reducer is what's going to pull the silver out of solution, so I like to keep it in a separate cup and then combine them together and pour them in straight away. Once those chemicals are combined, you'll see that they will start to change color. You can see at the bottom of the vessel there, I've already got a little bit of a color change happening, and we're going to gently rock the piece moving the chemicals throughout. This doesn't need to be an aggressive movement, you just want to allow the chemicals to flow over the surface. And that's going to take about three to five minutes or so. You can see I put paper down here on the tabletop because even though I do have that opening and closed off, it's inevitable that I'm going to get some drips here and I just didn't want to deal with any kind of silver stains on the tabletop there. As you can see, I was getting some drips there, so it's good that that paper is going to capture that.

(10:15):

As you can see, that bright silver finish has developed over the course of those about five minutes. This took when once my piece is fully silvered, I'm going to go ahead and rinse it out. While any excess silver can be rinsed out, we will rinse off the foam once again. And now we need to allow the piece to dry completely. Now we're moving onto our bonus piece. This is the metal layer piece. And so what we're going to be doing is what we call a flash layer. So this piece has already been cleaned. It's been tinned with a tin for silver that's been rinsed. So now we're doing a flash silver layer. This is going to be a quick layer of the silver, and then the GINA chemicals are going to deposit on top of the silver layer, so it's not going to be quite silver and it's not going to be quite galena. It's going to be a mix in between the two of those. And you can see with this piece, I was able to take the stem off the top. So I'm actually just using my gloved thumb there to close off that opening.

(11:49):

And I'm going to rock those chemicals around just for about 30 seconds. So a flash layer just takes about 30 seconds. We're just allowing the silver to start developing. But you can see that it's still a pretty dark silver layer. It's not nearly as bright and reflective as the other silver layer was. So that's what the silver would look like if you only allowed it to deposit for a short time. And you may be able to tell that it's actually more translucent. You can see through it a bit more than you could if you allowed it to deposit for the full time. So now that we have that base layer of silver on our piece, we can move straight onto the galena. Now, Galena traditionally does have a different sensitizing process. It uses tin for gold and palladium sensitizer, but because we have that base layer of silver, the galina's actually going to deposit on top of that silver. So once again, galina's a three-part solution. We've got our MEC bottles and we've got those measured out. We're going to do 15 milliliters of each of those, putting those into our cup. So this part of the process is very similar to the silver over just with different chemicals of course.

(13:27):

Set my timer here and pour my Galina chemicals into the piece. Now, the Galina chemicals do take longer to develop on the surface, so I'm going to rock this for about 10 minutes. Sometimes it can take up to 15 minutes with galena. And one thing I found with Galena is that it does for the first few minutes, look like nothing is happening, and then you'll start to see the change. And what we're going to get is a deeper finish. You can see it's almost got a purple tone to it. It's not silver, it's not galena. It's a beautiful metal layer for our bonus pumpkin piece. So now we've got our different lacquers and finishes to protect the mirror layer. I wanted to point out our century clear urethane. This is not one that comes in the kit, but it's a water-based urethane. And this is preferred by our international customers because it doesn't have any shipping restrictions.

(14:28):

But for today, we are going to go with our century clear lacquer. And anytime you're working with silver, you do need to protect it. The clear lacquer is going to provide a nice protection but also keep some translucency to the silver. So I'm just opening that lacquer up. There's a protective metal piece in there that I'm going to remove, and then I'm pouring a small amount of the clear lacquer in. And similar to how I did with the chemicals, I'm going to swirl that around and make sure that it fully coats all of the silver on the inside. Now, like I mentioned on the beginning of the video, if you have a piece that has maybe a complex shape and it's kind of hard water for the air rather to circulate for it to dry, what you can do is pour a small amount of acetone in after the silvering process.

(15:22):

And that acetone's going to help push out the excess water, and that helps speed up the dry time. And that's going to help you in the drying between the silver and the protective layer. So just a helpful tint tip there, and we talk about that more in the illustrated instructions on our website. But here I'm going to continue to swirl the lacquer all around. You want to make sure all of the silver is protected so that it doesn't get tarnished over time, gently swirl it and allow it to dry. Once that's dried, I'm going to clean up any kind of silver that might've crept over the edge using that silver remover. Just estimating equal portions there using a cotton swab, oftentimes, of course, it's going to be by the opening where that silver might've crept over the opening. The silver remover is going to work real quick to take that up and clean up the outside.

(16:23):

And here we have our transformed blown glass pumpkins. We've got three different pumpkins that all started with clear glass that have all been transformed in their own way with mirroring. Now, as you might've seen through the process, I did notice that, as I mentioned, can happen in the beginning. Our glass does have a little bit of a component to it that is showing through in the mirroring, and it's showing a little bit of a speckling that I wouldn't necessarily see on a pure silver mirror, and that's just a characteristic of the glass itself. Once again, that's something that's revealed in the mirroring process. And if you have any questions about this process, any ideas for videos that you'd like to see, be sure to leave those in the comment box below. Once again, you can check out on our Instagram page the details of this particular piece, how it is that we created these colored effects on it, and some closeup shots. Once again on Instagram, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and turn on notifications so that you see all of our future videos. And check out our website, AngelGilding.com. Thanks for stopping by.