Glass Fusing

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Fused Glass Project (2018)

Introduction

Glass Fusing started getting popular at my local glass supply house, McMow Glass, soon after I started making stained glass projects. I chose not to pursue fusing because, at that time, the kilns were expensive, most projects were small and mostly jewelry.

Lately I was looking for some new project ideas to mix my stained glass interests with my woodworking interests. While browsing the web I rediscovered fusing as a possibility and it now looked like I could now afford to buy the necessary equipment to do this at home.

This is about the same time I discovered a local hot shop for glass blowing The Benzaiten Center for the creative arts. See my daughter's and my experience HERE.

Even though setting up a hot shop at home looks just shy of impossible I wanted to take advantage of doing glass blowing while I could. Knowing that there are many more places offering glass fusing than glass blowing, I choose to pursue the latter. However I choose to take one glass fusing class just to be sure.

It turns out that the Benzaiten Center offers glass fusing classes and they are less expensive than McMow, however their schedule did not work for me, and I did not at that time have much experience with them, so I went back to my old friends at McMow and took the Introduction to fusing class.

The Class

Pattie was the instructor. She was knowledgeable, interested in helping you learn, and had many hints to help reduce costs of a project.

In the class you get to prepare four "coasters" and then they fully fuse and anneal them for you later. Many colors of glass, frit and stringers were provided at no cost; however you need to come up with your own design. (I had not prepared a design in my mind before attending)

Pattie recommended the book Joy of Fusing - Glass Fusing Basics, Molds & More.

Joy_of_Fusing_book

I purchased the book and found it to be well done and informative but cannot say how it compares to other books on the subject.

Although informative, with 12 other students and only 2 hours long, I claim the class was overpriced at $85.

The Result

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Class Project before Fusing. (2018)


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Class Project after Full Fusing. (2018)

NOTE: Some idiot rotated the last move.

I hope to do more fusing in the future but for now I am concentrating my resources on glass blowing.