GLASS!

Thanks to my amazing artist-Mother, I got to take an awesome 5-day intensive class on Advance Glass Fusing Techniques taught by Patty Gray @ the Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle last week. 9 hour days - it was physically exhausting, but so fun, and the time FLEW by! The pic above is a collection of some of the pieces I created.

Day one we made 6+ patter bars and glass boxes - the oddly stacked slices of glass shown above were flused into a solid slab and then on day 4 I sliced it up and used the pieces in something you'll see shown again in a later pic.

my work station - we had a big table for the 8 students... there were also 2 asst. teachers.

these glass pieces I chose to use in my "combing"... I made a 6"x6" box of glass (1/2 " thick) filled with slices of these glass pieces....

doesn't look like much here... but it took a long time to cut all that glass.

This was the result - it went from being straight strips of glass - to this wavy lined slab, because while it was in a kiln, and heated close to 1800 degrees, I donned welding attire and using long stainless rods, I "stirred" up the molten red-hot glass and when it cooled, it now looks like this. I will eventually put this in the center of a large square bowl or platter. I'm happy with the colors/types of glass I chose and the pattern I designed.

in the above pic, the grayish sections are slices of that first pattern bar I made (shown at the start), then arranged with lots and lots of other colors/sized pieces of glass - in an 8" x 10" pattern. This has "kiln furniture" butted up to the sides to hold it all together while it's in the kiln, or it would melt all over the place and loose it's design.

the result after firing. Again, I'll want to eventually fire this again and create a larger piece to be either display art or an artful plate/platter.

early stages of another 8" x 8" design I created...

after 1st firing... you can see it slumped into a "sushi-style" sq. bowl/dish in the very top collection photo.

my "mosaic" design... spent LOTS of time on this piece... this was ready for the 1st firing - layer #1.

after the 2nd day of working on it and the 2nd firing - there it is flat in the kiln. You can see some other students' work in there too!

ready for firing #3 - we slumped it in a slightly rounded 11 or 12" square 'bowl' mold. I am proud of this piece - I'd hope so, after spending close to 2 days designing/working on it! it's even better when you hold it up to light! Now I need a cool iron stand to display it!

Thanks again Mom & Patty for making this possible for me!

xoxo