It’s about time I posted again. I have been very busy lately. We had a craft fair at the local Elementary School, and four different stained glass Christmas presents I’ve been working on. Because some of the recipients of those presents read this blog, I will not be posting pictures of them for a little while yet. Instead I have a few pictures of some of the ear rings we sold at the craft fair. I have to admit that these are some of the worst pictures I have ever taken. They were taken with my iphone and I’m pretty sure the lens was smudged, probably by one of my snot nosed kids.
Some of these were sold at the fair and we still have some left. If any of you are interested in buying some, I'm selling them at $15 per pair. The hooks and wire are sterling silver. These are made by cutting cross sections from bottles and then fire polishing them in the kiln. I have many more of these in a variety of colores. If you want something specific I can make them to order, just let me know what you are looking for. Shown here are the more symetrical and matching sets if you want to see some of the more funky looking rings, just let me know. Also, I am planning on taking more pictures with my "real " camera. Starting with the new year these and many other products will be showing up on Etsy. When that happens, I'll write another post to let you all know.
I found a recipe online for a homemade liquid stringer. Liquid stringer is glass powder mixed with a liquid agent that allows the glass to be squeezed out of a plastic bottle onto a sheet of glass. In my case I used Aloe Vera, the green kind used for sunburns. Mix the Aloe with powdered glass and a little water and fill squeeze bottles with the stuff. Then you can “paint” sheets of glass by squeezing out the liquid stringer. These pictures are some of the trials that we ran. I had my wife and 2 year old help me with the designs. 
They were fired to 1400F which left them the exact same shape they came out of the bottle with no slumping at all. Next time I will try 1450F to see if they will melt down a little. It does give a cool 3D effect. 
The crushed glass came as always from bottles. The colors are blue, sapphire, green, brown, dark green, and yellow green. 
