Non-Fused Fusing Glass

I got very familiar with my MWK over the last few weeks, especially after making all those flowers! But "real" glass fusing, with dichroic? My results have been sporadic. I do love the ones I've made but the very textured dichroic - I end up losing the beautiful texture and ruin the glass. It's still beautiful but loses a lot of what I loved about it.

The photos below show my recent experiments with some of the dichroic I've been saving up. I have a lot of beautiful tidbits from scrap packs I bought. Here  are just a few of the nicest pieces! Luscious, aren't they??

You can see how I laid out the green piece from above for the MWK. I used some scrap red as the base...don't ask me why. :D You can see in the texture that the green becomes a blue color at an angle. Dichroic is so beautiful!

This was the result. I screwed it up. I didn't let it fuse long enough and put it back in before it had cooled all the way down. The result was I got a crack and fired it just a tad too long the next time. And in my opinion, I am not crazy about dichroic without clear glass over top...it just doesn't pop! I should have waited until I was more familiar with the MWK before using the good stuff! (I made this before I did all those fused flowers! I might be able to know better when to stop the fusing process, now!)

So, I cut that piece in half and put a clear cap on them and refused. They are the ones pictured on the top right, below. Big difference with the clear on top, right??? They are even more beautiful in person.

While these are truly beautiful in how they turned out, I wasn't happy with the loss of texture. The blue green ones kept some of it by showing a different color where the streaks are, but the purple triangles basically lost the dots it started out with. (The red/clear dichro ones were made by fusing the clear textured piece (from the photo at the top) face down on the red scrap. I did like the texture these kept a lot more...)

So, I was a bit hesitant to melt some more of my favorite pieces and have them come out badly, so I decided to use my trick of making a bezel with the flat aluminum wire I've been using recently - and not fusing the glass at ALL. I found some gorgeous copper colored flat wire and made this. What do you think? This piece of glass was just like this in a scrap pack...didn't even grind the edges. You can see it in the photo at the top.  I just love that natural little rainbow gleam in the corner! It's even prettier in person!

These two below are made from a piece of glass pictured at the top of this page. I love the way the light reflects from this glass! It looks green if you look at it one angle, orange another! As you can see in the picture...they are from one piece of glass, just facing different directions....All I did was cut it in half. So maybe I'm a chicken for not fusing these pieces but I am VERY happy with the results! :)

Let me know what you think in the comments! Thanks again for visiting!