Ruby and cherry woven fruit platter redgum kitchen bench

My friend rebuilt her entire kitchen….starting by pushing down the interior walls. It was a huge and messy undertaking. Regardless of the mess, the inconvenience and the cost, down came the walls, out went the stove and everything. The entire plan was to keep it elegant and simple with an enormous shiny redgum bench top as the feature.

This is where I came in. She wanted a bespoke ruby and cherry red woven fruit platter to match her fabulous new kitchen. I made a couple of test pieces for her to show her the different textures that could be achieved in the kiln.

Once that was decided, I purchased all the glass I needed and started cutting my strips. I cut them the old fashioned way, one at a time by hand with my trusty tools.

The ruby red is deep and doesn’t allow might light through it. It is a deeper colour than the cherry red, so we used both the cherry red and the ruby red in her design. It takes a lot of glass to make a woven look bowl that is 40cms by 40cms. You can see here a pile of glass (not including the ruby glass strips) ready to be washed and dried before going onto the prepared kiln shelf.

Once the raw glass is perfectly dry, the strips are laid out carefully on kiln paper. First the 8 vertical strips that included two coloured strips – one cherry red and one ruby red and then the 8 horizontal strips with one cherry red strip only.

She was consistent with her philosophy of simple elegance in everything she was planning.

You can see the fruit bowl here before its first firing. We wanted a gentle firing and not a full fuse – as this will give the rise and fall of the faux woven look that makes the eye think the glass has actually been woven. We were trying to get it to look like the warp and weft of fabric that’s been woven.

Gently taking the kiln only up to 677 degrees the glass was placed on top of the mold and here is the final result. We were so excited with the result we took pictures before it was delivered to the customer.