Fused Glass Wind Chime Class @ Eden Prairie Art Center

I often learn as much in my classes as the students do. When there are hundreds of colors, shapes, textures and other additives you literally could never do all the combinations yourself. Then of course there is your personal preferences which would limit you to what YOU like. I get a chance to see so many combinations that I would never try myself.

Doing these little color and shape studies is one the best techniques to learn what particular glass combinations do. Glass changes shape, color, and texture when heated. Consequently, the end result is very often not what you would expect. It takes years, after seeing a lot of projects done, to be able to reliably predict what will occur with particular combinations. By doing a whole series of small studies you can significantly reduce your learning curve.

I always take a picture before and after firing as a reliable record of what was done. Your memory really isn't good enough. In the closeup below you can see some of the glass elements the students used.

I bring a lot of choices to the class including: 100 samples of frit and powder, mica dust and chips, glass shards, rods, stringer, over 50 differ colored sheets and at least 20 different types of iridescent glass in black and clear.

All of the glass in the pictures are individual chimes for the wind chime they will make. There are few rules. You really just put combinations of glass together that you find pleasing. The size and shape of each chime will make a unique sound when struck by the other chimes, resulting in a cacoffiny of ringing.

In each class I also learn a few things to fine tune future classes. This time I realized that the little metal loops used to hang the glass needs to be fused into a small glass strip by me before class. This will enable a student to add a prefused loop to each chime simplifying that step. It was too confusing and tedious for the students to put the hanging loops in place themselves.

I also learned that students can optionally make between 10 and 14 chimes. They don't have to make 14 just because there are 14 holes in the metal support bar. As you can see in the picture to the right 12 chimes is fine. They are close enough to each other to perform their clanging best. Eight chimes would probably be OK too.

In my last class each student made 14 chimes and I think that was too many. But options are always good. Now with 14 they can choose to keep a few as backups in case the chime meets a tornado!