How to Apply Fusible Glass or Ceramic Decals

How to Apply Fusible Glass or Ceramic Decals

When working with decals things can go wrong even if you have read and understand our Free Glass Tips and Tricks on How to use Glass decals.

Fusible glass decals are a type of waterslide decal that can be fired in your kiln up to a full fuse. Our Black and White decals are also Lead Free and are packaged in biodegradable materials in keeping with our Eco friendly goals of the A Sanborn Corporation.

1. What Went Wrong with my decal?: As in the fusible glass decal in the photo above, you can see it is dispersed and smudged to the point you cannot see any fine line details!

Answer: This is a case of over soaking and over handling the decal.

Solution 1:

• Trim you decal, leaving a small clear board around the enamel decal design and do NOT place your fingers on the physical decal if possible.
• Soaking your decal should only be long enough to allow the decal to separate from the paper backing; this is normally 20 to 45 seconds. Make sure to use "distilled" water so that you do not introduce other minerals or water additives to the decals. Use tweezers to remove the decal from the water and then place it over the glass and slide the decal off the paper backing onto the glass.
  
  If you decal does not lay flat, gently place you finger down on the center of the decal and roll it towards the out of edge. Do not apply a lot of pressure and do not rub the decal or you can break-up the enamel paint that creates the design.

NOTE: If you soak the decal too long, it will float off the paper backing. If this happens, you must be careful to grab hold the clear edge and pull it straight up out of the water so it will not roll up onto itself, using tweezers makes this easier. The fact that it floated off the paper backing does not mean the decal is no longer useable but it will be more difficult to handle and you will need to make sure it is perfectly dry before firing.

Solution 2: You can place a full surface decal on the base glass but you need to fire it by itself to at least 1,250 degree F for a semi permanent bond. They you can carefully place your top layer of glass and re-fire. We suggest that you consider a slightly higher than normal slump fuse versus a full fuse to retail the color pigment and crisp lines of the decal. When you full fuse both layers of glass are molten and moving, this will cause the enamels to spread and thin out and can distort the fine line details if you over fire your glass.

2. What Went Wrong with my glass? As in the fusible glass decal (in the photo above), you can see a clear glass cap has slid off the base glass!

Answer: There was too much of the clear background left around the butterfly and the dragonfly enamel decals. To the dragonfly and the butterfly decal are covering almost the enter surface of the glass. The clear water slide backing of the decal will burn off and leave just the inked portion of the decal on the glass. In this case, since the decals were not trimmed to just a small boarder around the enamel designs, a large portion of the glass surface (the base glass) was covered with a waterslide decal. So, the two glass surfaces did not touch each other and they could fuse together, instead the cap glass slid off the base glass during firing as the glass started to become softer.

Solution 1: Trim the decal leaving a small clear edge around the enamel designs. Make sure the decals you want to use do NOT cover the entire surface of the glass or you really should use them on the top, surface layer, of glass.

Solution 2: You can apply decals to the full surface of the base glass but you need to fire the base by itself to at least 1,250 degree F for a semi permanent bond. Then you can carefully place your top layer of glass and re-fire.

TIP: We suggest that you consider a slightly higher than normal slump fuse versus a full fuse to retail the color pigment and crisp lines of the decal. When you fuse both layers of glass are molten and moving, this will cause the enamels to spread and thin out and can distort the fine line details in the fusible glass decal when you over fire your glass.