Glass Bamboo

This picture shows a piece that I made on special request for my step-mom Nancy. Both of us loved how this turned out!

Heres the story: she picked out a Chinese scroll down at the Portland Saturday Market, and I then made a glass window hanging based on this scroll.

I used black glass-line paint to put shadows on the ivory "bamboo" and for the brush strokes of the characters that read "Happy Bamboo".

And I used my metal stamp that says "LEAH" on a red blob of glass to sign the piece, sorta playing on the red square signature stamps that the Chinese artists will use.

Last month I received an email from my father with pictures of Nancy crying and a story about how the glass fell out of this frame that he had made when she was cleaning the window. It seems my dad heard her screaming and grabbed a camera to take pictures of her crying. So I told them to mail me the pieces and I would fix and mail it back. No problem.

The glass arrived in 3 pieces. I cut a large piece of clear (about 1/4inch larger than the broken pieces put together) and cleaned everything thoroughly, then re-fired with a good long annealing soak. There is an iridescent film on the back of the original piece, and this film tends to prevent the glass from flowing and it also shows scars really badly - but in the end the irid sort of broke up and swam around a bit on the clear glass that I fused it all to, and you can really barely see the crack at all! Check it out:

This is the piece all fixed. Its a funny picture, because its just propped up in my photo closet, but you can see how well it turned out.


It originally was textured (the leaves of the bamboo were 3-D and the red LEAH signature was as well), now that is all flat, but it looks great and oddly enough if you look close you can still sorta read my name on the red dot.