I had been promising myself for ages that I would make time and book myself on a creative workshop at Valentines Mansion, and I am so pleased that I did and to add to the pleasure, I had talked one of my old school friends into joining me so it gave us time to have a catch up too!
So we spent an enjoyable morning yesterday under the guidance of Amanda Seljubac on her Fused Glass Workshop, me creating my very own glass design on a coaster and my friend Tracey making both a window hanger and a coaster.
The morning started with us all arriving and introducing ourselves, it was a nice small friendly group of 9, all keen to get started. We were given books to look through for inspiration and then shown examples of other people’s work to help us focus on what we wanted to create. Amanda talked us through the various materials that would be available for us to use and passed them around for us to familiarise ourselves with.
My goodness, that was an eye opener, so many different forms of glass; frits and powders, stringers, confetti, millefiori and glassline pens plus other materials which we could incorporate such as copper, glassline paper and tinned copper wire.
First things first, we had to come up with our design idea, I plumped for a phoenix type bird from one of the books that we had looked at, perhaps a bit ambitious but hey ho, in for a penny, in for a pound! Amanda recommended that I draw around my coaster and then sketch my design freehand into the space which I did. Then the fun began, I used different coloured glassline pens for the outline of my bird, then frits to infill the body and confetti on the wings with stringers for the tail feathers. I used a very thin paint brush and tweezers to help me, I kept adding more and more to my bird as I strived for the look I wanted. Each tiny piece of glass had to be glued onto the glass and boy was it fiddly! But the experience gripped me with a passion. The final piece to my puzzle was to add some copper wire into the tail feathers as it changes colour during firing, but Amanda told us that it was unpredictable, so I wanted to see what would happen.
My friend Tracey managed to create a lovely glass hanger commemorating the birth of her first granddaughter using tiny copper feet and yellow powders with millefiori flowers either end. But bitten by the bug, she also decided to do an abstract coaster using larger pieces of coloured glass and stringers!
One other lady on the workshop had been to numerous classes before and had made two items, one a beautiful abstract coaster for which she had cut the glass into curves and fitted different colours together. Susan who sat opposite me had made a beautiful Kingfisher on the water’s edge whilst another lady made a window hanging gift for her mother’s 80th birthday.
All of us are eager to see our final creations which will be ready to collect at the weekend and agreed that we thoroughly enjoyed the workshop and would like to do it again.
Afterwards, we enjoyed the sunshine by having lunch in the grounds of the mansion at the Gardeners Cottage Café, talking about the workshop and catching up on old times. The perfect end to a perfect day.
Amanda is one of the resident artists’ that have a permanent studio on the top floor of the mansion, which, in a past life, had been the servant’s quarters. To find out more about her work visit her website:
Amanda specialises in stained glass, pottery and stone carving. If you fancy taking a peek at her studio or any of the other artists in residence, you can do so on one of the regular Open studio days. For details of the next one or to discover what other events are coming up visit the Valentines Mansion website:
www.valentinesmansion.com/whatson.php
Post Author: Cathy Pace
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