Fused Glass and Life Lessons

fused glass plate

Lately, things just aren’t working out in my life the way I had expected them to. The plan which was working nicely suddenly changed. The picture I had in my head about how things would look is different now. I am going to have to make some adjustments to my way of thinking and hopefully it will all end up being even better than I originally imagined.

Working in fused glass can be an analogy for life situations like this. For instance, even when I use the same firing scheduled that I have used successfully before, things can go wrong. Such was the case with the mump that appeared on my bronze striped tint plate. Or, sometimes I have a great design idea, but it doesn’t turn out at all the way I imagined it. I have several fused glass pieces that are technically sound, but just don’t look the way they did in my head. On occasion, I will take a short cut that more often than not ends up making more work for me. That’s what happened with my latest plate.

The old carpenter’s adage that says, “Measure twice and cut once.” would have been good to remember. When I cut the piece of  blue cathedral glass on the bottom left of this picture, I cut it too small. I should have cut another piece in the correct size. Instead I just added another small strip of glass to it. My thought was the two pieces would fuse together and you would never know it. Well, it didn’t work! The clear base glass showed through leaving a visible line where the two pieces were supposed to fuse together. It is barely visible in the picture. I couldn’t convince myself that this was a design element. Now I had to take what I had and refashion it into something else. I had to be creative and make something even better or at least different.

I used my tile saw to cut the piece in two by cutting the clear strip out. I now had one large rectangle and one small one. The two pieces were refired in my kiln to polish and round off  the edges. A little devitrification showed up on the plate. To fix this I masked off everything except the section with the black lines in it and sandblasted it. This gave that section of the plate satin finished look which I think adds a lot of interest to the piece. The pieces were slumped into molds, and instead of one long rectangle dish I now have one smaller rectangle dish and one butter dish. I really needed a butter dish, and in the end I like the redesigned plate better than the original design!

Here are the finished pieces…

2 thoughts on “Fused Glass and Life Lessons

  1. Caroline Kerr-Korell says:

    Hi do you by any chance give lessons?? or do you know anyone that does, in the winnipeg area, I live in East Selkirk. Tnks

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