Woven look fruit bowl that I made for a special person.

My friend rebuilt her entire kitchen….starting by pushing down the interior walls. It was a HUMONGOUS JOB. 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 as the feature. I’ve made several woven look fruit bowls before. You can see some of them here in this photogallery. Sometimes I make them square and sometimes they are rectangles. Once I made a round one, that wasn’t easy. You can see the image of that further down this blog. I can make them in almost any of the glass you can see on my website (rarely glass is discontinued).

This is where I came in and made a woven fruit bowl to match the redgum benchtop. This is going to be its new home. She wanted ruby and cherry red art glass together; the cherry was the feature colour for this platter. I cut 29 strips of clear glass, 2 strips of cherry red, and one strip of ruby red glass.

This is a piece of ruby red glass and a piece of cherry red glass on my cutting board.

The first thing was to purchase the colours that she ordered. Cherry Red and loads of clear which I cut into strips the old fashioned way. Here is the almost finished stack of glass used in this 40cm x 40cm platter. We fused some samplers to ascertain which firing schedule was best for the result we wanted. You can see the bottom sampler was fired at a higher temperature than the actual one we decided upon. Her finished bowl has more dimensions to the “woven” dimension.

A variety of pieces of art glass designed and made by Jenie Yolland. These items can be ordered from her via her website here. This design you can order it if you like. She makes it in all sizes from 20cms x 20cms up to 38cms x 38cms. This picture is of a tiny sampler for the ruby and cherry woven piece i'm making. By jenie yolland

The strips were carefully lined up in the kiln.

Here it is before the kiln is turned on. It goes into the kiln for a full fuse, but a soft full fuse so that we could see the dimensions between the layers.

Then, I prepared the mold after carefully washing and drying the work. Gently taking the kiln only up to 677 degrees the glass was placed on top of the mold and here is the final result together with images of other “woven-look” pieces I’ve been working on. I hope you enjoy this blog. Please let me know if you’d like me to make you a “woven-look” centrepiece for your home. [email protected] to start our conversation.