Philip Glass Only Wishes He Was El Diablo

Remember that glass class I mentioned?  I have actually been making stuff all this time!  Problem is, there's a lot of lag time between starting and finishing a piece (especially if you're making plates or bowls and require the use of a mold).  Depending on your design (or, as is more often in my case, how well I plan ahead and/or how much glass I have), there could be multiple firings, each of which adds another week to the production schedule.

We've been learning a variety of techniques, but I've mostly just been sticking to the standard "cut straight lines and grind the rest" school of glasswork.  Since tomorrow is our last class, I'm pretty much done with any large projects; plates and bowls and the like require at least two classes – one for fusing and one for slumping.  Tomorrow I'm planning on just playing around with the glass, rather than focusing on any concrete projects, and we'll see what I come up with.  Probably an owl.  It's always owls.  I feel like I need to redeem my owl-making after that first one.

Perhaps one day I'll sit down and explain some of the different things you can do with glass, once I actually have examples of said things.  Until then, I'll just play Show and Tell so you can see what I've been up to.

A sushi plate for The Husband.  Sushi plates are nice because they're small enough that I usually have the requisite amount of glass (5"x7.5"), but large enough that it feels like a proper thing to make.

A 4.5" square plate (I think this is technically called a candy dish?) with stringers (glass noodles).

A 7" square plate – white base with translucent blue and green overlay, with clear stringers on top.  I sort of wish I had fired it upside down at first (to get the green and blue glass to merge together a bit better), but that would have added to the firing schedule, and I am impatient.

Winter BirdFeet.  12" x 6.5".  The feet are broken bits of stringer; the "snow" (it was far less brightly colored before firing) is frit, which is ground up pieces of glass.

Seabirds (sort of).  This is the first plate I made, so don't judge it as harshly as the others.  The same blue glass as in the 7" plate above, with clear backing.  The egg decorations are either frit (the left and right ones), or confetti (paper-thin shards of glass).  This is also a sushi plate, but it didn't slump as nicely as the other one; I'm pretty sure it's because this one took multiple firings (back before I knew about this whole two-layers-of-glass-for-plates rule), and the glass shrinks in the kiln.

I have a few more plates in the pipeline, and I'll hopefully come up with a few more exciting non-plate pieces tomorrow.  Perhaps another Show and Tell will be called for?