Fused glass is created in several stages –

First, each individual piece of glass in the design is hand cut and glued onto a flat glass base. Base glass is thicker, while the design pieces can be relatively thin, depending on whether they’re solid or translucent glass.

Pieces can be layered to develop texture however it must be remembered that darker colors will not allow lighter colors to show through, even on translucent glass. A good example of texturing is in the citrus platter shown. Each of the citrus slices is cut out of colored glass, then the wedge “sections” were made by cutting pieces of a translucent white glass.

Fun and easy designs can be made using various sized pieces of glass to form a mosaic, leaving small amounts of space between each piece of glass. Or scraps of glass are all that's needed for a suncatcher like our fun fish. Stripes, circles, even curves can be cut and added to a glass design.

Once the piece is created,  it is fired in a kiln at between 1430^o and 1500^o Fahrenheit to fuse the glass together. Temperatures can be varied to allow more texture within a piece, or to melt the glass together smoothly. This process takes 16-24 hours to complete, depending on the size of the glass.

After cooling, this flat fused piece is set on the desired mold – saucer, bowl, tray, etc – and put into the kiln again for what is called slumping. The glass is heated until it “slumps” into the shape of the mold. This process takes another 16-24 hours at a temperature lower than the fusing – only 1275^o!

 Prices for fused glass vary and depend on many things:

     *The general size of the piece

     *The detail of the design

     *The use of specialty glass such as dichroic

     *The weight of the piece (this is determined by the size and whether glass is a double layer to create floating effects and how many layers of design are used.)