Fused Glass Flowers Technique

One of my New Years goals for my fused glass is I have decided to revisit some of my favorite techniques from some of the classes I’ve taken.

In Nov 2015, I took a 3 day fusing class with Patty Gray in Denver, Colorado with my good friend Pam. I wrote a blog about it at the time but then didn’t really do many of the fused glass techniques after class. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the fused glass techniques I just got busy and time passed.

Anyway as I promised myself I am going to recreate some of the fused glass techniques from Patty’s class.

The first one I’m trying again is my flowers. In class I did poppies and I just love them. They are so fun and I really wanted to do them again.

Since it’s been so long I had to go back and look at my pictures from class. Luckily I took step by step pictures. I did do a few things differently that my original.  I’ll discuss the modifications that I made that I like and some I’d do differently and not necessarily the technique(after all it’s Patty’s technique).

First I love them both, I just think you should learn from every piece that you make and sometimes what you learn is what to do again and sometimes it’s what to do differently.

What I changed and I like:

1. My new fused glass flowers are much thinner than my original piece from class and I like that my new piece is thinner. I like that it will fit into a stand easier and I could even frame it if I chose too.

2. I used aventurine green confetti for the grass and I just love the sparkle!

3. I used dots (including dichroic) for the center of my flowers. Love them in fact I’d probably always put the dichroic dots in future projects.

4. I used different colors of glass for my 3 flowers, love the variety of flowers, albeit I should have used more than one shade for each flower (like I did in my original).

Things I’d do differently:

1. In my new fused glass flowers I forgot the blue until a layer of clear was put on. I definitely like more blue so I need to remember to put it on the base.

2. In my new flowers I used green stringer verses black vitrigraph, even though I think the black is a bit harsh I should have used green vitrigraph or a darker stringer.

Overall I love my new fused glass flowers and will so make these fused glass flowers again.

BTW two of the most important things I learned is always take step my step pictures in class and never sell the piece you made in class!! It’s a great reminder!!