Create a Glass Studio
If you’ve fallen in love with making glass beads or fused glass or if you’ve always wanted to try glass, then eventually you’ll need to create a place for yourself and your glass. Between shards of glass, torches, and kilns, glass doesn’t work as well on the kitchen table as do beads or wire. You need to organize a safe area to work in were no one will step barefoot on a piece of glass, drops of melting glass won’t drip on the head of our cat, or fumes from a torch won’t make your family ill. I choose to convert a corner of my garage into my own glass studio. Here’s a tour. It might give you ideas about setting up your own.
Here I am applying kiln wash to the kiln shelf. It takes a while to dry since it’s humid where I live. Once dry, it protects the shelf from having the glass stick to it while heating in the kiln.
This is my cutting area and kiln. I keep the kiln on an old metal work bench. The cutting table is an old desk some one gave me. It’s narrow but also long, so I can spread out.
Here are my cutting tools and lots of glass pieces all over the place. The plastic waffle surface is available at most hardware stores. The ruler helps me use the cutters to cut a straight line (some times), the breakers in the middle break the glass, I use the nippers for smaller pieces of glass, and the needle nose pliers come in handy when I’ve goofed something up and need to pulled glued pieces of glass apart before fusing.
I use list handy little grinder to smooth off glass edges. I keep the glasses next to it so I won’t forget to use them. I also have a fire extinguisher handy, which you can see in the background.
In the center is a well used cookie sheet. It’s very handy for assembling and gluing glass pieces together. Also, when I’m done gluing, I can set the sheet aside somewhere to dry and free up counter space. Here the glue is drying in my bead area. You can see the lonely bead mandrels waiting on the side for some hot glass.
After the pieces are dry, I set them on the kiln shelf. I’ve only got 12 pieces here. Usually I can fit about 16 of the same size on my shelf. I can’t add more than that since there needs to be some air flowing around the pieces while fusing.
This is my kiln with both doors open. There’s a small front door used to slide in the kiln shelf or anneal beads and a top door. I purposely got a kiln with a top door so it will allow me to look in occasionally and see what’s going on. I find side door kilns a little awkward.
Here I am sliding in the kiln shelf. You can just see the little door to the left which fits securely in this rectangular opening.
I know that every time I open the top kiln door I’m letting heat out, but I can’t help myself. The best part of fusing it watching the different stages of the glass while it heats up. If I was taller, you’d get a better look too, but it was hard for me to hold the camera and door at the same time. That sucker gets hot!
You’ll find a number of other glass studios to visit under the Glass Jewelry section of this site.
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