Normally the maximum students I host in my fused glass classes in my home studio is 5. However, for my fused glass class on the 4th of February a couple of odd consequences occurred. Roni who scheduled it asked if 6 people could participate – I said yes since y’all are all friends. But then two people dropped out. Meanwhile I scheduled another class for 2 people (I know that’s below my minimum, but there was a reason and I’ll talk about it later), earlier in the day but they didn’t show at their time. They showed up at the afternoon class and another crazy thing is they knew one another – they work in D11! It was just meant to be! I set up for 2, then 6, then 4, and then finally 6 again. CRAZY!!


As always, I had the liability forms and their free pocket heart available. There were a couple of the students who didn’t know what they wanted so I had some samples available as well (picture on the right). I will admit because I let students make a variety of things verses instead of 1 thing, with 6 students it was pretty chaotic, and I didn’t take as many pictures as I normally do. Everyone was so patient waiting for me to teach each person how to make their specific piece.


I also had glass supplies for them, including hand pulled vitrigraph, dichroic, murrine etc.



Since I had a class on the 3rd I didn’t have much cleaning for my rooms other than my studio. Here are each of my rooms.




Beky wanted to make dichroic pendants. here are the two she made. Aren’t they beautiful!! The pendants also come with cords.






Alicia, I’m sorry I didn’t take any pictures of you except for the group picture, and you are looking down, I feel really bad. She also wanted full fused dichroic pendants. They both turned out so lovely.





Roni, made a heart suncatcher and small tea dish. For the suncatcher I left the chain long but when she picks it up, we’ll trim it to the length she wants.




Tracy made small (3×3) dishes. I love how they look, plus who doesn’t love blue!








So, Leslie and Kim are the two sisters who wanted to make cremation pieces. I’ve never given a class for cremation pieces because they are complicated, which is why I was going to do their class as just two students. I also thought it was a difficult class for them and thought being just the two of them would be best. However, as I mentioned they knew the other students and it was actually good and distracted them a bit from what they were creating. Leslie’s pieces are beautiful and included little murrine.





Kim wanted decals added so we created the pieces and then I added the decals and fired them again. Every time you put glass back in the kiln there is a risk of the piece breaking especially with ashes inside there is even more of a risk. You can see the dragonfly did crack.





Because the dragonfly piece is important and can’t be fixed by refiring it. I communicated with Kim about my concerns of leaving the piece alone i.e., it may continue to fracture. I added resin to the back and now it looks great. You can see tiny champagne bubbles, which reminds me of glass. Of course, I tried the resin on a few other pieces as well.






I know what you are thinking, did I make anything? No because I had two classes back-to-back and there wasn’t enough room for me to create anything. Please let me know (elegantfusedglass@gmail.com) if you have any questions or would like to have a private fused glass class all you need is 3 people to create a class.
If you would like to see more of my fused glass work, please refer to my website Elegant Fused Glass by Karen. If you get a chance, check out all my site and my Elegant Fused Glass by Karen YouTube. If you would like to stay abreast of what I’m up-to check out our newsletter. If you’d like to take a class, please check out the information on my site about my classes. It is published the last day of each month.
Karen