Football Hearts

How to Make Football Hearts 

These are fun and easy to make. You can make them in either the 12 and the 9 heart molds. Just a heads up, they do take three separate firings. (For footballs made by Beth Alongi in coe 96, you get them in her shop!) These two mold styles work because they are flat and relatively shallow. First make sure you spray your molds with Zyp. I recommend this over kiln wash because of the smoother surface you get on the back and sides. Once the Zyp is dry, fill each cavity with roughly 8 ounces of medium or coarse frit of either green for the turf, or your preferred team color. Don’t use fine or powder. You will have to mound it up in the middle a bit, but spread it out as evenly as you can. Once your molds are full, put in the kiln and full fuse them. I like to raise mine up on 1/4” strips of tile. I go 9999/1380/15, 9999/1500/10. I don’t anneal this first step. Take them out and clean them off when cool.

          

Place the clean hearts face up on your work surface. Using a tiny drop of cyanoacrylate super glue (I get mine from Temu. It takes forever to arrive, but it’s cheap and burns off completely). Don’t use gel superglue, or regular superglue with a lot of ingredients. They will leave a white scum after fusing. Try and get pure cyanoacrylate.

Nip some stringers, and with one tiny drop of glue, glue them to the hearts like in the picture above. Let dry. It should only take a few minutes. Watch them closely until dry, the stringers like to spin when you’re not looking 😉

 

Once the glue is dry, carefully transfer to a kiln shelf that has kiln wash on it, or your choice of kiln paper. I use a kiln washed shelf myself for this step since it doesn’t go too hot. The schedule I use for this step is 300/300/0, 350/450/0, 9999/1350/0, 9999/900/30. You basically want to go just hot enough to fuse the stringers in place, not flatten them. 

COE 96 users please note: For Beth Alongi's football hearts, she doesn't recommend going above 1310 with no hold.

Once cool, remove from kiln and wash any kiln wash or fiber paper off. Use white paint or marker of your choice, I use white color line silk screen paste. Paint the white lines between the stringers.

Very lightly re-spray the heart mold, and carefully drop the hearts back in, stringer side up. Nip your football rods into thin chips. Place one on each heart. You should not need glue for this step if you do this right in the kiln. If you must glue, use one tiny drop of the glue mentioned previously. 

Refer to first picture for football placement. I added a few slices of the football murrini along the mold edges, and they rounded up perfectly like real footballs! I’m totally in love with them 😊 The schedule I use for this step is 250/300/0, 300/450/0, 9999/1430/10, 9999/900/60. The underlined part of this schedule is very important! You need to adjust this schedule for YOUR kiln. For my 16” fiber kilns, this rounds them up perfectly. Take care not to go too hot. Your goal is a light to medium contour fuse.  

COE 96 users please note: For Beth Alongi's football hearts, she doesn't recommend going above 1310 with no hold for a light tack fuse. You can always put it back in to soften it a little bit more, but you can't undo it if it's over fused.

Remove from the mold when cool and clean again. This is what mine looked like when I opened the kiln. You can download a PDF copy here. Have fun with these!

         

Beth Alongi also has a blog with this really cool platter project if you'd like to take a peek!