If you’ve been following along on our Facebook fan page you probably know what we’ve been up to. If you don’t know, well now you will.
I’ve had a couple sheets of 104coe glass sitting around for what seems like years, gathering dust in a dark lonely corner. Last week I decided to pull out the sheets and try a little experiment mixing our handmade lampwork glass supplies and fusing. For first time around I decided to use some scrap pieces just in case it wasn’t going to work. No sense in wasting a good sheet of glass on the unknown.
First step.
Pick out some complementary shard colors. I was going for an organic look so I picked some colors that I thought would create some good reactions. In the one closest we have Lunar Rainbow, Silvered Ivory and Silvered Caramel shards. Added to that I overlaid the shards with black stringers, a bit of Rosewood Fusion Frit and a handful of Ocher Spiral Murrini chips.
On the other piece I used Amphibian shards piled high with black stringers and another stringer color that I custom mixed.
Fast forward 12 hours...
After Firing
After the first firing this is how the pieces came out. I love how all the shards mottled a bit, the way the black stringers set off the shard colors and just the over all look. When I pulled these out of the kiln I was pleasantly surprised by what came out. Obviously the first thought that came to my mind was “I definitely need to make some plates like this!” but lets stay on track here.
Step Two
Pendants all cut out.
Now we get to cut up the pendant sheet stock into all sorts of fun shapes and sizes. At this point you could either use a tile saw to cut the pieces out or if you only use one layer of sheet glass for the base like I do, you can still score it and snap it. If the sheet is too thick though the scoring method won’t work and you’ll have to use one of those deafening tile saws! Plus the scoring method leaves a much cleaner edge.
Step Three
Drilled Pendants
Drilling Holes
We’re almost there! Now that we have our pendant shapes it’s time to give them some holes. For this I used a heavy duty drill press with a 9mm diamond core drill bit. I wanted the holes to be pretty big so people could either add a jump ring or loop fat ribbons or cord through them. To make sure the drill bit went through the glass like butter I cut them under water. Worked perfectly! It’s also a great idea to wear hand protection when drilling. If the drill bit catches and starts spinning the pendant around, you don’t want your bare finger there.
Step Four.
Now that we have our pendants drilled with holes it’s time to put them back in the kiln for another session. Instead of doing a full fuse this time they’ll be going through a contour fuse. All this is going to do is soften out the hard edges that we created from cutting out the pendants and drilling the holes.
Last Step!
After two days we finally have a finished product. Now just photograph and sell 
These pendants are currently available in our etsy store.
The finished product
