In September, I took a glass fusing class from The Goddess of Glass in north Minneapolis. Scrolling down past this entry, you can see I haven’t been doing much productive beading lately, and I wanted to do something fun and creative, but without any real expectations of myself. I simply expected to make plates in an evening — sometimes it’s lovely to just make something out of your wheelhouse, with a short-term commitment of a couple of hours. This class definitely fulfilled that, and I’m quite happy with the finished product.

Connie Beckers is the glass artist behind The Goddess of Glass, creating stained and fused glass. She teaches out of her home studio, The Funky Bungalow, and has a shop a few blocks away, The Goddess of Glass and Friends, where she sells her work, and the work of over 100 local artists.

We started the evening out with squares of clear glass, and given free reign to bins of colored glass. Many of us did little cutting, using the glass pieces and stringers as they were. Stringers can be easily snapped between fingers, but scoring and cutting glass precisely is definitely a practiced skill. So, organic shapes it is! After gluing the glass in place on our base squares, we left the pieces with Connie to fuse. The picture below was taking with my phone’s camera.

Going back about a month later to pick up my plates:

These colors are fairly accurate on my screen – notice how the red brightened up considerably. That color was Connie’s suggestion, and she was so right.

And here’s the plates as I currently them have displayed in my home.

I like the plates stacked, too, especially when I keep the movement of the lines in the same direction. I made the center basket 2-3 years ago. The pear on the left is pottery from Gruchalla / Rosetti Pottery of Duluth, Minnesota. They don’t have a website, but they are represented by Scanlan Fine Arts Gallery in Chicago; I purchased it at the American Craft Council Show in St. Paul in 2012. The tiny hole for the turned pot is in the top of the stem, which you can see. What you can’t see is the copper wire around the base of the stem and the bottom of the pear. It’s a beautiful pear!

I am currently working on a piece I hope to finish in a week, mostly a little wire work (which is also out of my wheelhouse). Next post will be some in-progress pictures!