Fused Glass!

Following the rousing success of taking a glass beadmaking class, I decided to take another! I've been seeing so many fused glass beads at crafts festivals and gosh, I love them all! I decided to take a fused glass class at the Stained Glass Workshop on 4th street, and today was the day! Timmy came along once again to interpret for the beginning. He had a lot of work to do, but he took a portion of his day to make my class easier for me.

The class was a lot different than the first class I took. The first big difference was that the teacher gave you a brief overview of the skills, and then let you free. In the first class, the teacher would teach you one skill, let you try it out, then call you back to teach you the next skill. In retrospect, both teaching methods worked perfectly for what was being taught. The techniques that we learned in the first glass beadmaking class require skill that you only get through lots of practice. Alternatively, fused glass seems simpler. You basically cut up sheets of glass and assemble them with glue before you stick them in a kiln to fuse them together. It still requires lots of practice to know what looks good and what doesn't, but anyone can make a fused glass bead. It just may or may not look pretty. There are two types of glass fusion; a tack fuse, or a full fuse. A tack fuse requires a lower temperature in a kiln, and the pieces of glass stick together, but don't meld together. A full fused piece is brought to a higher temperature in the kiln so that the entire piece of glass becomes one big piece of smooth glass. You have three tools, really...if you don't include glue. The first is a glass cutter. It has a little blade and you run it across the glass to score it. Then you use your second tool, which is kind of a ...set of pliers with one raised line. You put the line on the score, and then squeeze it together, and it makes the glass break along your scored lines. This works well for straight lines and slight curves. Then you have this interesting little scissor-ish tool where you can kind of hack whatever shape you want. It doesn't work very well. You end up with lots of sharp little shards. Then you end up with lots of little cuts, and lots of blood everywhere.

So once you give up the idea of making that perfect circle, or that perfect squiggly shape you had in your mind, fused glass is pretty fun. You can't fuse glass side by side, so you have to build in a tower like design. I mostly made small beads, but then I tried to make two coasters, too. One is lots of fun colors, and the other has a christmas tree! They couldn't fuse them while we were there, so I had to pick up the fused glass beads after I returned from Florida. I've included pictures of what I made here! To get these pictures, I had to use Tim's macro lens and Tim's tripod. We had to set the tripod so high up that I had to stand on a chair and I almost fell over.