Thursday, April 3, 2008

Glass Fusing Class - look I'm an artist!

In early March I took an all day workshop called "Beginning Fusing" at Bella Glass Studio here in Denver. It was an early birthday present from Dan. The class description reads: "Explore the creative designs of hot glass. In this class you will learn the fundamentals of kiln forming while creating your own exciting fused glass pieces." We made 2 pendants, a vase, 2 coasters, and a picture frame. I really love the pendants and the vase. The white, red and black pendant was "tack" fused. In other words, it was heated just enough for the glass to stick to itself. The blue pendant was "fully" fused. The blue glass is on the bottom and a slightly larger piece of clear class was placed on top. Then I added chips of iridescent dichroic glass on top of that. Then the pendant was heated enough so all the layers of glass melted together to form a smooth surface. For the vase, we each selected a flat, square piece of class. After you polish the edges and corners a little (to make them less sharp), you simply center the piece of glass over a vase form in the kiln, when the glass is fired, it melts or slumps over the form.

With the coasters, I was trying to match the colors in our living room but the execution was a little disappointing. For the picture frame, our only color choice was black and then we could add other colored glass chips. I chose pastels because they would show up against the black and it doesn't really match any color scheme in our house.

It surprised me a little that the class was mostly about the technical aspects of the craft - very little about the artistic aspects. Over all, it was enjoyable and I might go back and take more classes.