More about Sources of Inspiration

Anything can become a source of inspiration for design. It can be a color, texture, shape, abstract, realisitc, organic or man-made. I am fortunate that my daughter works in an old fashioned sweet shop and looking at the many jars of sweets, stacked in rows, is a great source of inspiration (not to mention the delight in eating them).
The colours of these licorice torpedoes make them so appealing to the eye. The combination of their glassy look and synthetic colours were the inspiration behind this glass candy dish. Fortunately, Bullseye makes opaque glass that reflect the artificial brightness of this candy and placing the different coloured glass squares together was great fun.

I'm not a big fan of candy - I prefer chocolate myself but I am rather fond of licorice. Again the bright colors of Licorice Allsorts proved to be a source of inspiration, particularly as each bright color is bisected with black.

I have attempted to make these Allsorts cufflinks slightly more sophisticated by using deeper or more subtle colors than those in the candy, including turquoise blue, red, vanilla and soft blue. I hope that the "fun" element in the design hasn't been lost in translation. I really like these cufflinks and they look great on a white dress shirt. The studs are silver plated.

Finally, this dish is again inspired by candy but the colours are slightly different. Instead of opaque glass I have fused transparent glass onto white. By separating each coloured glass piece with a tile of white I prevent muddy colour combinations occuring. As transparent glass is see-through (obviously) it is going to reflect the colour underneath. Without the white tiles the amber glass fused to green would make a nasty brown, the turquoise on the amber glass would make a dirty green.

All this glass is available for sale at my Etsy Shop. 

Dichroic glass is lovely

I love dichroic glass. I first saw it on a US glass website and thought "that is the glass for me". I originally used Dichromagic but now I only use CBS (Coatings by Sandberg). When I first started making dichro jewellery there wasn't very much made in the UK and so the galleries I approached were quite taken with it. I went to the British Craft Trade Fair at Harrogate and most of the dichro I saw there was fairly awful (quite a lot of badly cut and underfused pieces) which encouraged me to invest more time and energy into making dichro fused pieces. Now, of course, the market is saturated with dichro and I am constantly changing my ideas and designs to keep it fresh. There is so much mass produced dichro on eBay that I can't get a good price so I'm quite glad there's Etsy now. I like to add small pieces of dichro on fused glass dishes to give them a sparkle but dichro is so expensive I have to use it sparingly. Like all my glass, I save every fragment when I have cut it and fuse the small pieces in the kiln to make decorative "blobs".
What is dichroic glass? Dichro isn't a glass in itself but layers of quartz crystal and metal oxides that coat a glass surface. As long as the coated glass is compatible with other glass then dichro coated glass can be fused with transparent or opaque glass. CBS dichro is coated onto Bullseye therefore CBS is compatible with all glass that is 90COE, including Bullseye. You can also buy other dichro coated glass, such as float, which will be compatible with glass that is 82COE. Both these types of dichroic coated glass are available from www.warm-glass.co.uk
Why use dichroic coated glass? The dichroic coating transmits a colour which, once heated, reflects a different colour from its surface. This reflection is dependent on the angle you hold the glass at because the refracted light from the surface makes it faceted. Dichro can also be influenced by the colours you are wearing as dichro jewellery can pick up different variance of colour. A good example of this is the blues which can range from cyan to violet. Wear it against black and it will be different than wearing it against, say, green. Wearing dichro jewellery is very attractive because the flash of changing colour catches the eye as the wearer moves around.














Dichroic glass jewellery by Glassprimitif is available from:
www.shawgalleries.com
www.glassprimitif.etsy.com
www.keighley.ac.uk/kaf

Glass is good

The first glass I began fusing was float scrap that I could get free from work. I would fuse washers, copper wire, copper sheet, leaves and razor blades between the float. I still have these samples in a box along with all the pieces that went wrong. (It's a big box). When I got more familiar with glass fusing I looked around for a coloured glass that met my requirements and settled on Bullseye. The colours are so rich and vibrant. Here's an example of a few pieces of my Bullseye glass stash. My favourite colours are red (of course), vanilla, lime green, orange, amber, black and turquoise. Bullseye isn't the cheapest glass and all ambers, oranges and reds are the most expensive because of the gold content. So I have been looking around for a more competitive supplier. I have to weigh up my fuel costs against postage costs and it is definitely more cost effective to order glass by post than to travel to the warehouse I usually go to. The most competitive UK Bullseye supplier has to be www.warm-glass.co.uk where I already buy my dichroic glass. The new site is easy to navigate and they stock such a huge range of Bullseye colours that I am reeling from the choice. I'm going to have to make a purchase soon as I want to make dishes in chocolate and blue opal glass. I can even save glass I like in my Wish List so that I can go away and think about it before I commit to buy. If anyone wants to buy me a present from Warm-glass I would like the book "Contemporary Warm Glass" by Brad Walker. Thanks!