Push Molds: Burgard - Cat and Face

When I was down in Tucson - I picked up a couple of the old Burgard push molds. They were on the discontinued table of one of the big vendors. So far as I know - they are no longer being made. The backs of them are signed and dated, the cat is dated 1998 and the face is 1999.

These two are actually small enough for soft glass (most of the molds I see work better for boro and are huge). I'm sure many soft glass users are just baffled by them, however. "It's not a press and it doesn't have a mandrel slot."

I do want to give you a close look at these so you can see the scale of them, and understand that they are a concave mold - because the photos do that tricky thing where they seem to reverse themselves and appear to stand out, and then recede. 

 Go on - stare at those two faces - raised, inverted, raised, inverted.

 There - that makes it clear - it's a cavity.

 It's "Mc-Cavity - the mystery cat"

 This also makes the size of them clear too - the face mold is about an inch long for the entire mold - the face itself is 17 mm long and about 5 mm deep at the bridge of the nose. The cat is a little deeper.

 I just did a couple of quick ones to see how they worked - needed more glass here to fill up the ears. I just melted a gather of glass on the end of a rod and pushed it in. Make sure the mold is on the table by the way - it's going to get hot.

 Did a pick-up of frit on this gather first - and put the gather on the end of an old, bent mandrel.

If you don't firepolish the heck out of it - the detail is quite nice.

The picture is crap - but the faces came out quite nice - ready to be embellished or integrated into something else.

If nothing else, you could make some nice little cabochons with these.

If you see them languishing on a sale table somewhere - pick one or two up.

They are practically collector's items now!