My Glass Jewels

Once in a while, I get the urge to pull out my fused glass materials and make a batch of fused glass "jewels" in my tiny jewelry kiln. They're very fun to make, and I like looking at the surprise "jewels" that are created. I've always thought they'd be great accents on needlepoint projects; and indeed, that was the reason I bought the small kiln many years ago.

I've only used the jewels on a few projects. It's harder than I thought to a) mass-produce lots of the same jewels, and b) create just the right jewels for certain projects. One of the best uses of fused glass jewels happened in my PURPLE PANELS design. Here's the whole design, which works vertically:


or horizontally:


I wanted to create something elegant and abstract, that could also incorporate a fused glass jewel in the design. And all of the blocks of patterns were really fun to stitch up.

This design also uses one of my favorite design tricks: I pick a variegated thread color I like, and then stitch it with several different colors to see how the variegated colors change when they're mixed with different solid colors. The Waterlilies' color I used here was 06 - "Amethyst" because it has such a yummy mix of blues, purples and greens. Here you can see it mixed with DMC 340, periwinkle blue.

The orchid colors you see above (DMC 552 & 553) are used again in the lower boxes. And they pick up the amethyst colors in the attached fused glass jewel as well.









All in all,







this is another one of my favorite pieces, and I never tire of looking at the different elements that make up this sophisticated abstract design.