Day 248 - Commissions
It is a good day when friends ask me to work on a new project; it gives me a sense of purpose, and I get to learn new lessons when I am doing something I haven’t done before. Today included such a project.
A friend of mine recently bought some metal shelves to use as bedside tables. He has added some decorative boxes to use rather like drawers to keep things in place and out of sight. However, the shelves are made of chrome-plated wire, and little things not kept in a box fall through. Larger items placed on top can tip over. So he needs something to put on top of the shelf to make it a solid surface.
There is a project I have been wanting to try using Bullseye glass, and their recipe for “river rock.” Employing a chemical reaction in the kiln between two colors of glass frits and powder, the end result looks like a stream bed full of gray rocks. It is quite remarkable, and the recipe is fairly straight forward. My friend and I agreed on this as the tops for his shelves, and I got to work on it today. It took a little more time than I expected; the glass didn’t cut as cleanly as I expected, and the sheet of colored glass also wasn’t quite big enough, so I had to make some adjustments.
I hope these turn out to be both beautiful and useful. As an experiment, it’s hard to know, and it will take days to find out - each of the two pieces is large enough that they will have to be fused in the kiln individually, doubling the amount of time it will take to be ready to install.
I am so glad to have friends who are interested in owning my glass work, and excited about how these will turn out; I am equally pleased at the opportunity to participate in the creative process. My project will look different from the original design shown in the Bullseye Glass example, and I think will suit my friend’s bedroom in several ways. I can’t wait to see the results (and hope they fit well on the shelves).
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