Swirled Purple Square Strip Cut Dish

So, how do I describe this dish? It's square, It's purple and it had been made by cutting strips of different coloured glass. One sheet was opaque lavender, one a lovely rich royal purple, and the main piece a mix of swirled purples, white and yellow giving an unique glass dish. It is about 5 in x 5 in (12.5 cm 12.5 cm)square, with the corners raised about 2cm in height. The glass itself is 6 mm thick, so a nice solid piece. For any of my items that are shaped (not flat), the piece has had to go through at least two kiln processes. Firstly, the piece is fused together flat, by going through a fusing and annealing process which takes the piece up to about 800 degrees C. This takes almost 24 hours, as the temperatures have to rise (and fall) slowly and steadily so as not to shock the glass into shattering. Once this process has cooled, the piece is put onto a mold, and the whole process repeated to allow the form to slump and shape. This is not as high a temperature process as the fusing, but takes almost as long. Stresses built up in the glass during the two processes need to relax over an extended period of time. Did you know that glass is an amorphous substance? It has no regular crystalline structure like metal, salt or sugar - the molecules are really quite random. (This is one of the things I find fascinating about glass.) This also means that it takes a longer time to get to its optimum strength - by annealing. But I digress... Once cooled and cleaned, the dish has small silicon semicircles added to the bottom to finish it off and allow it to sit correctly when placed on a table.