Winter has finally decided to show up in Minnesota. No, I’m not complaining about the previous lack of snow. I have really been enjoying the snow-free days that we have had. But, now that we now have snow outside, I am sharing pictures of some fused glass projects I have recently made.

To update the winter table decorations for my dining room, I created a mini winter scene.

Snowflake Bowl. 12″ circles with frit, mica and glass clay, full fused and slumped.

Scrap Glass Evergreen Tree. 6″ equilateral triangle of opal white glass, topped with bits of scrap white, contour fused and slumped over an arch.

Winter Trees and Fence. Scraps of clear glass and coarse frit, with a bird added to either side for some interest. This can actually double as a napkin holder.

Snow Houses. Pieces of clear glass, cut to shape and full fused. White frit powder was stenciled on to make the door and windows and coarse white frit was used to add “snow”.

On the table. A cutwork table runner and a garland of crystal beads, completes the decor.

At night I can add some tealights behind the houses for some more sparkle in the room!

Having several glass landscape design ideas, my latest glass projects were made for a bathroom in our house.

My first landscape was designed to use some of the beautiful Opal Art glass that I had purchased on my trip back from South Carolina in February. This type of glass is absolutely lovely with its rich colors swirled together.

To design the landscape, I took photos of the sheets of glass, printed them, cut out some of the curves to depict mountains and taped the pieces together to figure out what worked best. I was really excited about my first design.

Each of the sections of glass were carefully cut and then full fused to create the background.

Unfortunately, when I opened the kiln the next day, I was extremely disappointed – the glass had large bubbles in the surface. Further testing of the kiln shelf that I had recently purchased showed that the shelf had micro defects in the surface that caused air to be trapped thus creating these large bubbles. Subsequent tests of the kiln shelf resulted in bubbles in the exact same spots. I’m still working with the manufacturer to try to get the shelf replace. I salvaged the bubbled glass for some pot melts and drip melts that I will share in a later blog post.

Using an older shelf, I designed and fused another landscape. I did simplify the design when cutting the glass. Luckily no bubbles developed this time!!

After full fusing the background, I added details, murrini, frit, etc and contour fused the project. The result turned out really well.

The second landscape I made was more of a floral scene rather than a landscape. For this piece of wall art, I used scrap strips of green glass full fused to create an interesting background. Onto this, I tacked some murrini and several practice pieces of lamp work glass (leaves and flowers) from a class I had taken a few years ago. I also included some freeze and fuse leaves and butterflies and some custom cut flowers.

The result in a playful, colorful bunch of glass flowers.

The third piece of glass art was a trial at making a pattern bar. For this trial, I layered glass frit and scraps in a pattern trying to replicate a tree. After full fusing at 1475 degrees, I sliced the resulting bar into 1/4″ sections. Two sections placed opposite one another gave somewhat of a tree appearance. While not great, this was a successful trial run and I will be trying more pattern bars in the future.

To enhance the look of the tree, I added some additional green frit and full fused again.

My final landscape was actually two panels. While visiting my mother in the spring, I saw a wall quilt which depicted farm fields with a city skyline in the background. At the time, I thought the idea would work well for a glass art project. To create the background, I cut and full fused several different pieces of glass to make the “patchwork” fields.

To embellish my idea, I thought it might be fun to include some buildings of the Minneapolis and St. Paul skylines. Hopefully, if you know the Twin Cities, you can recognize the buildings that I have included. These were contour fused to each panel.

The new art is mounted on the wall in one of my bathrooms and adds a bright pop of color to the room.

Over the winter, I tried out a new fused glass technique call Frit Stretch. This technique takes advantage of the way molten glass will flow to create a uniform thickness. By stacking the glass to the sides of a shape, the glass will flow inward. When frit is placed on top of the glass, these small pieces of broken glass will stretch as the glass flows.

For my first attempt, I used several colors of coarse frit that I had in my supply. The teal, green and orange colors looked nice together. Unfortunately the pink frit was too light and did not show very well.

The hole in the center of the casting closed up after a second fusing to level out the glass. I added some green vitregraph and white pebbles to create a plate with a Lily of the Valley design.

After this initial project, I realized that coarse frit was too big for this technique. I have since tried other frit stretches with medium frit. The smaller pieces of glass look much nicer. I will post more about these other projects at a later date.

After seeing how my first attempts at frit stretching turned out, I recently tried stringer stretching. Stringers are thin, approximately 1mm, round strands of glass. I thought if I used twelve sections, it might create a nice background for a clock. For this project I used ridged clear glass with bits of stringer placed in the ridges in a pattern.

I really like how this stretch turned out. The hole was bigger than I expected and did not close when I did a second full fusing. To remedy this, I printed a backing of white PLA on my 3D printer. My attempt at making a clock turned out nice. Even without numbers, it is easy to tell what time it is.

After making this clock, I tried out another clock idea that I had seen on-line. This was a piano clock originally made out of printed plastic, but I wanted to try making it with glass.

First, I made a test tile to if cut pieces of white glass and black glass noodles (thin glass strips measuring 1mm x approx 4 mm) would make the pattern that I needed for the piano keys. This test tile turned out really nice. Not wanting to waste the glass, I added a jewelry bail and made a pendant out of it.

For the keyboard clock, I cut 84 pieces of white glass and 60 pieces of black noodle. These were contour fused to an 8″ circular piece of black glass. Another 5″ circular piece of black glass was placed in the center of the larger circle and the cut glass was carefully positioned around the perimeter of the black backing glass. A couple white pebbles and some waterjet cut musical notes were added for details and to designate each of the hour markings. After the project was contour fused, a hole was drilled in the center using a diamond drill bit and clock workings were added. Voila, a wonderful music themed clock! I have more music themed glass ideas that I hope to make sometime soon.

A few years ago, when helping my mother organize her craft supplies, I found a rock tumbler that had been my grandfather’s. My mother was not planning to use it, so I took it home thinking that I would put it to some use. When I returned from that trip, I stored the tumbler in my glass studio. Unfortunately, I then forgot all about it.

After I retired, when organizing my glass studio, I ran across the storage box. Instead of leaving the tumbler in the box, I took it out and put it to use. In another storage container, I had some stained glass scrap glass that I was given several years ago. I decided it would be nice to try to make some Sea glass out of these scraps.

Fall of 2021, I was able to make several pieces of sea glass. Each batch took about a month to sequentially go through the abrasive grits. Unfortunately, the motor in the tumbler burned out during the third batch of glass that I was tumbling. I’m sure that my grandfather’s tumbler had been sitting and not used for a really long time. So, I was not too surprised that it didn’t last very long. I am glad that I had it to try out. Knowing that it was a useful craft tool, I purchased a replacement.

Last January, while on a walk on the beach in South Carolina, I had an idea for a way to shorten the time needed to create the sea glass. Sea glass is made naturally when broken bottles tumble in sea water which has sand in it. So, I collected a container of white beach sand and packed the container in my car. When I returned to Minnesota, I did a test by tumbling glass with the sand. I was extremely pleased with the results. After only three days, the effect was similar to a month of tumbling with commercial grits.

After making the sea glass, I used some of the glass to make a wind chime for my mother’s birthday. For the top of the windchime, I made a fused glass flower. I drilled holes in the sea glass and then connected each piece onto sections of chain attached to a piece of a wood branch.

After making this windchime, I designed a couple more to give as Christmas gifts. For the first one, I cut leaf shapes from the scrap glass, tumbled the glass for three days and then strung the chime to look like a tree. I really like how this one turned out and may actually make one for myself.

The rest of the sea glass that I have made are small pieces and not useful for windchimes.

To make a windchime for my other sibling, did not include any of the sea glass. Instead, I designed and fused pieces of glass to make a cat themed windchime.