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 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

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

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.

It’s that time of year again. Time to spread the love! Whether you celebrate Valentines Day or not we would still like to show you some love.

Starting Feb 14th and ending Feb 19th get yourself some great glassy deals!

25% off
Marbles
Disc pendants
Focal Beads

20% off
104coe Shards
104coe Confetti
96coe Shards

15% off
104coe Fusion Frit
96coe Frit and frit mixes
104coe Vine Cane

10% off
104coe Streaky Stringers
104coe Silvered Stringers
104coe Veining Stringers
104coe Murrini

Last but not least. All domestic orders over $75 ($100 international) recieve free shipping! Just enter coupon code “freeshipping” during checkout.

Have a great Monday and the rest of the week!

Another great broadcast another kiln load of beauties!

Disc Pendants
The two pendants in the bigger photos are absolutely to die for! My new favorites.

Tree Focal
I’m in love with this new style of tree. The abnormal shard backdrop really brings something to this tree focal.

Pandora Beads
Mostly stripes this time with a couple ribbed style thrown in for good measure.

It’s been almost 2 months since my last blog update! OK well I haven’t been a total slacker. Things have been so hectic lately that I didn’t have the energy to make any updates. Things have seemed to calmed down for now so I should be able to start posting again.

There is so much new since my last update I don’t know where to begin! I guess I’ll use this posting to introduce my new line of pendants that I started doing a couple weeks ago. I call them “Drop” pendants due to their rain drop like shapes. The styles in this line include “Fritters, Honeycomb, Swirl, Aura” and new today, “Cosmic”. Each one is has a unique but distinct look within each style. Continue on to the next paragraph to find out where you can see these awesome new pendants.

I’ve also decided to try out a new selling venue called ArtFire, where I will be listing the majority of my new work. If you look over there —-> on the right sidebar near the bottom, you’ll see I’ve added a new feature called “Rapid Cart” that pulls five random items directly from my Artfire store. The cool part is, you can buy them right here without even leaving the blog! Isn’t technology great! Well when it works in your favor it is

Lastly, I’ve been bitten by the Twitter bug. If you’ve never heard of it, no its not some exotic insect. It is basically a micro-blogging tool that I use for small and to the point updates. A lot of the times I just don’t have the time to sit down and spend an hour or two writing up a full fledged blog post, so this is perfect! I can keep people informed quickly as to where new items are, what to expect, and anything else relevant. So if you aren’t following me yet, be sure to come on over to Twitter.com and click on the “Follow” button.

~Joe~