Last week the kids and I attended a Fuse Glass workshop held by the lovely Clare from Fused Glass by Clare Poore. She runs workshops from her home for kids and adults and we thought it would be a fun activity for the kids to try and something extra for them to add to their art award portfolios. We have never tried anything like this before but both my kids loved the activity and loved Clare, so we highly recommend her workshops (in fact both my kids have asked if we can go again).

some of Clare Poore’s Fused Glass pieces

So what is fused glass? You get given a piece of glass and you decorate it using glass frit (small pieces of coloured glass).

You can trace a design onto your glass using a sharpie (the outline disappears when the pieces get baked) or you can just draw your design onto a piece of paper and place it under your piece of glass.

Then you choose your colours, apply some glue (just to make sure the glass frit stays in place) and you get started. The high temperature of the kiln fuses the glass frit to the main piece of glass.

There are a couple of different options for this. You can create a design on a glass slab (roughly 12×16 piece), you can decorate some glass shapes that have already been cut (so things like hearts, stars, circles or tree triangle) or you could also go for a glass bowl. And the beauty of this is everyone ends up creating pieces that are completely original.

My son went for a frog design whereas my daughter wanted to play around with patterns and colours – and both ideas ended up with stunning results.

To see the full effect here are some “before the kiln photos”

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And then “after the kiln photos”

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I must add we chose the decorating workshop designed for kids (so the glass pieces already had the sharp edges removed) but Clare does also run workshop for adults which involve other options.

Oh and Clare also has a shop where she sells some lovely items (I bought some of her stunning earrings)