Fusing Alphabet

Some time ago my daughter and son-in-law came to stay with my grandson who is just 2 years old. He is a gorgeous redheaded little fellow and has an infectious laugh and a naughty grin (who says grandma’s are biased?). As in yesterday’s Blog when friends came round so it was when my daughter came that they wanted to play at fusing too. After playing around a bit and getting the basics they suggested that we try and fuse glass over an object to get a 3D effect. If you don’t know, you need two layers of paper in the kiln, one to protect the base of the kiln (fibre paper – wool, HINT: don’t cut it up on your bed, you’ll itch) and one to give the glass piece a smooth bottom – Thinfire paper (no comments please). Using my card making skills and equipment I diecut a fleur de lits out of Thinfire paper, put it on top of the glass paper, covered it with glass and fused it. This is the result. It’s quite a subtle image but we had moved on again.

My daughter then asked if we could get letters into the glass because my grandson liked playing with the glass nugget rejects (they are very tactile) and she was trying to get educational. So I experimented and devised this alphabet. It took a long time to finish the project as each piece is fired twice and some didn’t work out first time.

The letters were cut out of fibre paper because the glass sticks to this and the letters stayed white.Using a die cutting machine and alphabet die I cut all the letters of the alphabet eg  ‘d’. Then they were fused under a piece of clear glass ‘a’, then that was fused over a piece of coloured glass ‘c’ and the result is the red ‘a’. Most of the letters worked out OK but a few bubbled especially with ‘o’ and ‘s’ when there wasn’t much space between the parts of the letters. The final size is about an inch square. Anyway, my grandson had an alpahebet that is certainly unique and multicoloured as I used lots of different pieces of glass.

Work tomorrow and Friday so no time to Blog but I’ll write again at the weekend after my first glass craft sale – I’m hoping some people will turn up to buy my wares.

Cheerio

Jane