About

Debra Stone

Hello and Welcome. Just a short note about my love of art, color and art glass!!

I have been involved in artistic endeavors for most of my life in one way or another - Pottery, Folk Art, Stained Glass. When I discovered art glass and glass fusion, I saw a world of possibilities in this art form. From there things began. The more I learned the more it grew.

I would like to acknowledge and thank my wonderful husband Wayne for his undying love, support and help and many tireless hours spent designing this Website.

I would also like to acknowledge my Mother and Father for their influence in promoting my artistic interests. Their artistic talents were many with my Dad being an amazing wood carving artist of wild birds and ducks. My mother won awards for her hand made quilts and rug hooking and was involved in numerous other folk art forms learned in with her Magic Circle Quilting Group and as well as in her Birthplace of Prince Edward Island on the east coast of Canada.

Dichroic Glass Description (here's the scientific part!!)

Dichroic Glass is formed by electroplating various metal oxides on the glass resulting in a spectrum of strikingly bright colors. Understanding dichroism is problematic and requires some knowledge of physics and optics.

Dichroic color is not a pigment or a dye. Whereas the usual glass achieves its color by absorbing all the colors you don't see, dichroic glass achieves it through light waves loosely interfering with each other while passing through ultra thin layers of metal oxides, vaporized on the glass in a vacuum chamber.
These films of metal oxides represent the multilayer interference filter.
It is in this layer, over 100 times thinner than human hair, that dichroism,
the property of exhibiting different colors by reflected or transmitted light, occurs.
The result is a transparent, yet highly reflective colored surface.
The specific color is determined by the types of oxides, their thicknesses and the viewing angle.
You can quickly determine if the glass is dichroic by tilting it and seeing the color changes.

Although the principles of multilayer interference filters were known in the late 1800's, it wasn't until the 1920's and 1930's that vacuum techniques advanced to the point where dichroic filters could be fabricated in a laboratory setting. In WWII the need for more and better optical instruments resulted in the development of large industrial vacuum plating systems. Although these systems were primarily used for mirrors and optical coatings, they were nonetheless capable of depositing multi-layer films. In the late 1940's, the techniques of accurately and repeatable controlling the thickness of very thin films were developed and large scale production of dichroic filters became possible. They were used as reflectors in film projection lamps. They were truly dichroic in that they reflected the visible light towards the film and transmitted the heat out the rear keeping it from burning the film. In the last 50 years dichroic filters have found their way into literally hundreds of applications ranging from eye-catching plastic materials to measuring the makeup of atmospheres on Jupiter's moons.

PHOTO ALBUM

StoneWalker Designs, Dichroic Fused Glass Jewelery