Glass maker and fusion founder

Virginie Torrelli

Profession of glassworker founder, decorator

He must know how to use several glass working techniques, hot work with fusing, thermoforming. But also sandblasting, cutting, polishing which is worked cold.

I use the oven melting or fusing method. It’s a technique that’s over 3,000 years old (the Egyptians used it). It consists of cutting sheets of glass and assembling the cut pieces on top of each other cold. Then I put the whole thing to cook in an oven. The different pieces of glass fuse at more than 800°C to form a single, homogeneous piece. The lenses used must be compatible. They must have the same coefficient of expansion otherwise they cannot really fuse and will be brittle.

I work with different kinds of glass:

- Artistic glass (manually spread by flat glass manufacturers) ;

- Dichroic glass (fired with different layers of metal oxides) ;

- Float glass or window glass;

- Bottle glass, recovery glass.

For decorations, I use lead-free powder or liquid enamels, liquid gold, different metals (steel, aluminum, kanthal) and mica (refractory mineral powder)

How is glass made?

To make glass, sand must be mixed with two chemicals: soda and lime, which are heated to 1,600°C. The mixture then becomes liquid glass which is poured into a mold or a tin bath to make plates. As it cools, it takes its final, transparent and solid shape.

A job to tell us beautiful, bright stories!

The legend of the discovery of glass

The Roman author Pliny the Elder says that the glass was discovered by Phoenician (Middle Eastern) merchants who had just landed on the banks of the Belus River. They hadn hungry and wanted to heat up their pot. To place it on the fire, they happened to take pieces of natron, a kind of rock. Under the effect of heat, the natron mixed with the sand transformed into an unknown liquid and translucent material: glass.

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Mother Teresa

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Oscar Wilde