​Glass is considered to be a amorphous solid. That means its atoms and molecules are locked into place like a solid but are arranged more randomly than most solids, similar to a viscous liquid. Even though windows seem to be solid, the glass is made of a supercooled liquid whose molecules move very, very slowly and are cooled to a rigid amorphous solid state.  You could say that glass is its own state of matter because it is neither a solid or a liquid.

As the glass heats up in the kiln, its liquid nature becomes visible. At about 1450F, you can see the edges of the cut glass starting to soften and melt. At 1550F, most glass is beginning to flow and behaves like syrup (extremely hot syrup!), and as its temperature continues to rise, you can see it moving in the kiln.

How hot the kiln gets has a lot to do with how a particular piece of fused glass looks when it’s done. Some of my designs use a “tack fuse,” meaning the glass gets hot enough for all the cut pieces to fuse into one solid piece of glass, but the cut pieces still maintain their individual shape and texture. Other designs are fired to higher temperatures, so they reach “full fuse,” with the separate pieces losing their angular shape and melting into a softly controlled puddle.

​After the glass reaches the right temperature, the cooling process begins. The glass needs to expand and contract at the same time so that the cut pieces will melt together completely and still be stable when the glass cools again. The glass is cooled down very slowly, and when it’s done, the pieces are hand filed. Some pieces are fired more than once, with new layers and elements added in between firings.

​I use dichroic glass in some of my jewelry work. Dichroic (pronounced dye-crow-ik), commonly called dichro for short, means “two colored”. Dichroic glass reflects one color when light bounces off the surface of the glass and transmits a different color when light passes through the glass. This reflective phenomenon is known as thin-film physics.

The uniqueness of this glass is quite fascinating, almost magical and extremely beautiful. The colors you see are physics in action. The result of the microlayers of metallic oxides, that are colorless themselves, interacting with light.  The transmitted and reflected colors in a piece of dichroic glass depends on which metallic oxides were used, and on how many microlayers were applied and in what order. When you look at a piece of dichroic glass, you see the reflected color. When you hold it up and look through it, you see the transmitted color. If the dichroic coated glass is on an opaque glass background, like on black glass backgrounds, you only see the reflected color, but you see it with great intensity. If the dichroic coating is on a clear glass background, besides being able to see the colors shift when you look through it, you can look at the sides of the piece and see the glass is clear.

Dichroic glass art has been around since the Roman Empire. The effect was originally created with trace amounts of gold and silver in a large glass melt, resulting in glass that only partially reflected light passing through it. Dichroic glass became more widely known in the 1950s and 1960s when NASA developed a process to vaporize metals with electron beams in a vacuum chamber and directly applied to surfaces in an ultra-thin film.  NASA began experimenting with dichroic glass to protect spacecraft technology and developed astronaut face plates that would block harmful sunlight in space.  The technology is based on extremely thin-films of metals using selenium, titanium, manganese and other metals. The complete process may require 15 to 45 different layers totaling a width that is smaller than a human hair. Because the process of creating dichroic glass is so costly, a single pendant may seem comparatively expensive for glass.

In a word–quality. Everything I make is a unique work of art. The fused glass at big box stores is mass-produced. Just hold a piece of that mass-produced fused glass up to my artwork and you will see the difference. Plus, I do custom work!

Yes, fused glass is generally food safe, but I do not recommend eating off your art work! However, if your fused glass piece has an iridescent or dichroic coating, it is NOT food safe. I do not recommend microwaving your fused glass or running it through the dishwasher.

​Is the glass fragile? Does it require special care? The glass is no more fragile than a good drinking glass but is no less fragile. Things that would break a drinking glass will break fused glass, like dropping it on concrete or some other hard surface, striking it hard against another piece of glass, etc. Barring that sort of thing, your piece should last forever. The glass can be washed gently with clear water or alcohol if it needs cleaning.