The Family Jewels!

Before going to Devon last weekend I managed to cram in a jewellery fused glass workshop run by the incredibly talented Michaela. She showed us how to make our own jewellery designs by using 4 different techniques. The 1st one involved us cutting plain glass into shapes and using off cuts of Dicroic glass(which Michaela had provided ) to make a design up. The pieces were attached with glue and when fired would fuse together in the exact shapes we had cut. We all had great fun cutting the glass which tended to shoot up everywhere. Good job we were all wearng safety goggles. We got through several mugs of coffee as we wern't too sure where all the bits went to.Lol!!

The next technigue involed cutting gold leaf shapes and sandwiching between two sheets of glass. Believe it or not this started out as pale yellow glass and is now a lovely orange whilst the gold leaf has also changed colour. Apparently you can never tell what the results will be until after the firing.

The next one uses a special sheet of glass(called frit glass) which is white with black squiggly lines running through it. You place this over a peice of plain one coloured glass and when the two are heated together they fuse like this. I used a pale pink underneath. You can just see the sandwich of the colours on the earing shown on the left of the picture.

And finally where you pile it up. Any pieces hanging over the bottom slice of glass will drape over the sides when fused together. This is my favourite and The Doc likes this the best too.

Michaelas next class will be coasters/dishes/bowls and I can't wait to go on it.