From Richmond, Australia to Auckland, NZ

From Richmond, Australia to Auckland, NZ – another custom order – another happy ending.

Sometimes I open up my emails and find that some lovely person somewhere else on the planet has been carefully going through my website, taking notes of what they glass designs and shapes they like, and sending me a comprehensive order of what they’d like me to make for them. This is one such story and it’s a story with a very happy ending. Read on if you are interested. If you aren’t interested, maybe next time!

So … they liked this piece that we call “Lime Delish”.

As you can see its a gorgeous lime green with clear glass separating the swirling green and white featured in the centre.

On the outside you can see matching lime green strips of glass that are extremely thin (we call these items stringers) and on the separating strip of clear there are matching white stringers.

Transparent glass pieces are hard to see on the white cloth. Sorry about that!

Whispy White was another glass design that they liked as well from my website. I made this as an enormous fruit bowl, its very elegant and almost perfectly flat. I made this one in Whispy White on Clear for a local customer of mine.

And they kindly said that they liked this piece too, its a combination of lots of white and green pieces of glass in a woven design.

These “faux woven designs” – the glass doesn’t actually go under and over itself, although it looks like it – are hugely popular all over the world, especially as fruit bowls.

The air circulates under the fruit and keeps it fresh longer. Simple idea, but it works, and it looks great!

I’ll show you a wide shot of this pieces, its called “Spring Woven”.

This is the combination they wanted.

Also they wanted to incorporate some of this glass which is called Lime and Lemonade.

It’s basically perfectly clear with whisps of pale lime green glass throughout it. So can you imagine how we combined all of these to create one centrepiece for their new mahogany dining table? The table is a rectangle so they decided to design their own woven piece that measured 30cms x 40cms, in keeping with the dimensions of the table. I love it when my customers let their own sense of style and design come out!

We had many conversations backwards and forwards and I sent pictures of every step and agreed on the order of each strip – you can see below how I started to begin the laying out process, when the perfectly clean and dry strips are laid on the fire-proof kiln paper.

Naturally, it will look very different on a dark background so I put it on my charcoal carpet to show them how well the whispy pieces will look when its in situ in Auckland.

When all the pieces were carefully aligned it went into the kiln for a long loooooongng tack fuse – but not a full fuse because that would have resulted in all the glass melting together way too much to achieve the gorgeous dimensional look we were after.

Phew – that was exactly what we were wanting. A dimensional effect. Next we needed to slump it into the shape they’d chosen. The shape we call the “Nippon”.

Here it is all finished – ready to pack and get to New Zealand safely. As always, I start by bubble wrapping it twice,

… then I put it in a white sturdy boxboard box that I’ve had made especially for my glass pieces. I then bubble wrap that box twice and then I build a box around the whole thing. Here is the beginning of the second box being built.

The whole parcel ended up quite large as you can see here. The whole piece weighed 4kgs in total, and of course every story deserves a happy ending and the review I received was fabulously glowing. They are sending me a picture of it on their table next week. As I said at the beginning “From Richmond, Australia to Auckland, NZ – another custom order – another happy ending.”