The paperweight class I’d signed up for at the Mesa Art Center, though cancelled three times in a row, went off fine the fourth time I registered for it, and I was able to make three paperweights.  We were having trouble with the crucible kiln not clicking shut properly, and the glass got too cool, which is why they are such a hefty size (four inches in diameter).

This was my first one. Since I hadn’t done any hotshop for almost a year, I decided to make it simple and simply roll the first gather of glass in the mixed frit.  Ironically, the simplest technique makes the most interesting, most complex paperweight.

Here’s another thing that people do when they make fused glass pieces; they make slumped bowls and trays.  I had less enthusiasm for this, because I’m a potter, and pottery makes functional, sturdy, dishwasher-safe pieces that don’t cost $60 in raw materials.

There’s a flaw in one of the bands because I tried to cut it while sitting down.  Apparently, you can’t do that.  I ruined a lot of glass before someone told me.  After I stood up, my cuts came out right.  I was so impressed by how much better it was that I got some bed risers and raised my studio table at home by seven inches or so so that I can work on my art pieces while standing.

You might think a tray like this has little function, but I intend to give it to my sister to replace a fruit bowl I’d made for her years ago that got broken.  It’s good to keep fruit slightly elevated, and exposed to air, so you don’t get those moldy spots underneath it.

This is what most people do with dichroic glass; they cut pieces and assemble them onto a plain background, then cap them to make pretty doohickeys. I’ve seen a lot of jewelry like this. In fact, almost all glass jewelry looks something like this.   I admit, it’s amazingly pretty, but it’s so easy that it feels a little cheap to make this and call it art.

I have not yet drilled holes or glued a finding to make this into a keychain.  I’m not sure if I will.

Here’s what I found about the iridescent glass.  When you put dichro on top of it and fuse it, it doesn’t fuse completely because of the iridescence. This worked in that I was able to put masking tape over it and feel where the outline of the body and thorax were so that I could cut the legs.  But for these, I used plain black glass, and they melted flush.  I tried using clear packing tape as a mask, but it didn’t work because the texture is more like plastic than cloth.

The instructor suggested using lines of glue for the mica pigments. That’s what normal people do when they use mica.  Well, I’d tried that with elmer’s glue and it came out blobby, but another idea was to thin it with water, then put it through a jacquard bottle with a fine tip.  That’s what I did here.  The glue gives a much different texture to the mica pigments.

Belatedly, I was informed that if you have an iridescent or otherwise metallic background, you need to cut the capping glass larger. Yeah, a little late for the top left beetle.

So now I figured out that you have to fuse the dichro to the background glass before you cap it.  Here’s what I also found–when you have iridescent glass in the background, the dichro doesn’t fuse completely flat. That means that even when you fuse it before capping it, you get blisters of air trapped in there.

But I had a new plan.  I decided that having legs behind the bodies wasn’t good enough. I also wanted to have some details on top of the bodies, stripes and thorax lines.  So after they’d been fused, I put masking tape over it and cut out the mask for the legs and antennae, so I could have gold lines on top of the bodies. Here’s the result.

I liked my other beetles, but they really needed dichroic class. Dichroic glass looks like beetle’s wings, one of the most beautiful things in nature, and I had to combine them.

First, I made the legs by cutting masking tape, lifting the positive, spraying with hairspray, and dusting it with mica pigments.  When I lifted the rest of the tape, I had some great beetle legs ready for bodies.  Next, I cut the dichro (being as careful not to waste it as I could be–that stuff is expensive!) and carefully glued it on to the mica legs.  Super glue does not stick well to mica pigments, fyi.

Once I’d glued the dichro down, I cut clear sheets of glass to fit and set them on the shelf to be fused.  When I got them out, I found that they had these blisters of air surrounding the bodies.  Yes of course, the instructor said, the air got trapped because the dichro took a while to fuse into the background. You have to fuse the dichro first, then cap it in a second firing.  Great.  Now I knew.

Now that I’d done a few beetles, I decided to see if I could make a butterfly that looked okay. Butterflies are easy to do poorly, and hard to do well. I find that if I stray too far from a photograph or good drawing of a butterfly, it doesn’t look as real as I’d like.  I tried doing some butterflies that had the mica pigments in negative and the butterfly in positive.  I think these look pretty good, as far as the shape.

One of the things I did here was try out the dichroic glass. Dichro glass is absolutely beautiful, and exorbitantly expensive. I bought a 2.5 oz scrap pack for about $26.  If you buy it by the sheet, it starts a $1 a square inch.  It’s stunning to look at, and some glass fusers do nothing but dichroic glass on simple backgrounds.  I didn’t want to just cut chunks and pretend it was jewelry though, I wanted to make something. So here I used the dichro scraps for the body, and in one case the wings of butterflies.

The second picture shows what the glass looks like when you hold it up to the light. It’s iridescent green.  The iridescence does funny things to the glass that’s on top of it, as I found out (and will explain more about in the next post.)  The mica pigment also does funny things to  the glass, namely, makes it not want to stick.  I think that’s why I got those ugly air bubbles.

For this dragonfly, I used a clear sheet over amber.   The instructor suggested it for greater visibility.  She didn’t quite understand that I was a skinflint who didn’t want to buy more clear glass, I guess.  This was before I had tested the mica pigments to see which ones worked (bright gold) and which ones didn’t work at all (aluminum).  I managed to pick one of the good colors, so the dragonfly came out very well.

This technique was something I kind of made up, because the other students in the class just did their own, straightforward projects.  I saw that someone was using mica pigments on her glass work, and I have a bunch of those that I use for mixed media.  Naturally, the ones made for glass are expensive.

When you fuse glass pieces together, you glue the glass with a special kind of glue that will burn out in the kiln.  Some recommended elmer’s glue (it’s crap) and some recommended super glue (fine, but unforgiving) and other people ponied up for the glass glue (of course it costs more.)  Then someone recommended hair spray.

To make these dragonflies, I started by taping masking tape over a sheet of amber glass. Then I used a very sharp exacto knife to cut out the dragonflies.  I had printed out pictures of dragonflies before hand to use as a reference, but the cutting was done freehand.  Using the tip of the blade, I lifted the center part of the tape out, then sprayed it with the hairspray. Before it was dried, I dusted it with mica pigments. Once the hairspray dried, I shook off the extra mica pigment, then carefully lifted the tape to reveal the dragonfly.

Part of the reason why I chose this concept was that I bought more tinted amber and yellow glass than clear glass, and I wanted something that would show even when the glass was not completely transparent. As you can see from the image, not all of the mica pigments work perfectly. The one at the bottom right is aluminum, and it burned up and turned black.  The one at the top left burned, and made an air bubble which got trapped in between the glass sheets.

My first couple of pieces are really ugly. So ugly that I might not even show pictures of them here. One is a circle with a wave on it, and the other is a four-piece windchime/suncatcher, sprinkled with some broken stringers I made. I don’t like them at all. They have the same craft-kit feel that I see in a lot of fused glass, and they seem kind of kitchy.

I wanted to make something that felt like art. I also wanted to make something that wouldn’t involve a second trip to the glass store, because my first supply run had set me back a hundred bucks–and I bought stuff from the scrap rack! I had a lot of this amber colored glass, and I had some mica pigments, so I thought about what insects look like when they’re trapped in amber, and I came up with the idea to make these beetles. Next post, I’ll talk about how I did it.