In the Frame

One late afternoon last summer in Marty Kremer's fusing workshop at Corning, I found myself having a lot of leftover pieces of glass and wanted to do something different.  I had an hour or so before dinner and really didn't want to start a typical strip cut piece.  This is what I came up with from the table scraps.  I finished most of it there, but finally got around to cleaning up the edges and taking a photo.  The photo really sucks but I didn't feel like getting out the tabletop photo tent, lights, and tripod.  So I just spread out a piece of wrinkled fabric and made a quick snapshot.

I had a bunch of white and clear strips left and was playing around with them.  I thought that the alternating patter of the clear and white made a nice pattern and a reminded me of matting on a picture.  That spawned the idea of framing something interesting.  

The pattern bars are actually four strips of a communal pattern "sheet" we made in the class.  That was interesting.  We set up a 20" square on a kiln shelf and surrounded it with kiln furniture.  That was lined with fiber paper.  Then the class went to town in the scrap bins filling the interior with random cuts and colors about 2" thick.  I've done a lot of bars, but never had seen a sheet done like this.  The result was a little less than an inch thick and 20" square.  That was sliced up into half inch thick bars, 20" long.  I selected a few that I thought had a cool pattern and graduation of warm to cool colors.  

Two pairs of book matched strips were then laid down.  The original intent was to fill up the interior of this frame with the pattern bars, but even I couldn't take the jumble of color.  I settled on the two pairs you see here.  There was still an open area and I was getting hungry.  There was a nice piece of chartreuse but not nearly enough.  Rather than cut up in strips, which I knew wouldn't be enough, nor have the look I wanted, I opted to lay it flat.  This is only one layer of chartreuse and there were three layers of clear underneath it.  

Due to the way we were loading kilns, I think this one got bumped a little.  I had to trim the border a little so it isn't perfect, but it's OK.  I had a lot of kiln furniture surrounding the borders, but I probably should have used a little more.  I slumped it in a low square bowl mold and was very pleased.  The wrinkles of the fabric are a little distracting in this picture, but otherwise the photo does show the transparency, which is what I was hoping for.