Step 4: The First Bend

Here’s another view:

Two things to note about this setup:

• We are using a piece of half-inch fiber board under the pendants and we have cut the end at an angle (so the end of the pendant can drop straight down) like this:

  
  Pay close attention to the thick black line – that’s our angle.
   

• The fronts of the pendants are resting on fiber blanket – that helps cushion the focal beads so they aren’t pressed up against the fiber board where they are more likely to pick up surface texture. A little texture is okay, though, since our final firing will fire polish the piece.

Several layers of pre-fired fiber paper can be used in place of the fiber blanket.

Okay – we are ready to slump the strips. We will use the two layer slumping schedule on this site – as before, this schedule is extremely conservative for this firing. If you make a lot of these you can run some tests in your kiln to find out how fast you can speed this up.

And here’s the result!

We are almost there!

Now for the second bend…