Fused weights

My husband and I like to play Yahtzee. This is a game using 5 dice. We found that this was quite noisy on our table so we use a beading mat to roll them on quietly. However, when we go away on holiday or play outside in the garden the mat is likely to blow away as it’s very lightweight. I decided to experiment making cloth weights from fused glass, but this involved having a hole in the glass which is a challenge with small pieces in a microwave.

I eventually came up with these. The bottom layer is clear glass and the top layer is blue glass with bright orange pieces of confetti (confetti is small pieces of very thin glass).

The glass is pieced together as above with the left hand plan being the bottom (clear layer) the right hand one being the top layer. Building the glass this way ensures that the glass fuses properly. The confetti isi then scattered on top. The pieces are then fused one at a time for about 12 minutes in my microwave.

Then I had to find a way to attach them to the cloth. This proved impossible with the beading mat so I knitted a mat instead and then sewed the pieces on to the corners. I backed the glass with white felt so that they wouldn’t rattke together on travelling but ended up with an excellent weighted mat that didn’t fly away even in a gale.

Tomorrow I’ll start a series on microwave fusing basics.

byee

Jane