Fused Glass Fun

I've been having so much fun taking a weekly fused glass class.  

The assignment for the first week was to learn how to cut squares and make a simple tile.  You can tell from my tile that cutting squares wasn't particularly my strength, so I embraced the wonkiness and created a design around it.  

I used colors from my my guest bedroom and did what is called a tack-fuse (at a lower temperature), so that it would maintain its dimension (rather than melting down into a single piece of glass).  I used some of the leftovers to make a few pendants.

The next assignment was to make plaid using four colors of glass.  I chose green, teal, blue & clear.  Here's what it looked like before it was fired.

And here is the tile after its first fuse.  It will go back into the kiln to be slumped (molded) into a small bowl (both tiles are 6" x 6").

Our third project was called a River bowl.  This one goes into the kiln this week.  I can't wait to see how it turns out.  I used a gorgeous teal swirled glass with light purple frit (aka river rocks).

And in class number four, we played with glass powders.  I was able to use some of the stencils from my papercrafting studio, which was fun.

I also made a bunch of pendants (or maybe they will be magnets), using some glass scraps, but I forgot to photograph them before they went into the kiln.  Next I'd like to make more magnets and maybe even some glass monsters.  So fun.