Green Lake Glass Creations
by Tamara Summers.
(Sarnia, Ontario, Canada)
Recently I’ve been playing with the green lake glass I’ve collected, seeing what I could come up with.
I started to see that some of the pieces could make a nice flower design, but what should I mount the flower onto? I noticed a larger piece of beach pottery, that was perfect. The centre of my flower is a lovely piece of deep blue glass I found.
I decided to match the centre with some beautiful royal blue preloved cotton lace material which I bought a while ago (actually, it was a dress in a former life). I used that to make a bale, and also added some of the lace at the bottom of the pendant. I thought it looked like frothy waves at the shoreline.
Because the pendant isn’t flat, it didn’t sit properly on my chest, so I knew it needed to be a longer necklace. It took me a while to come up with the idea of hanging it from a matching strip of lace. I used the hem of the dress, which had a seam. I attached the pendant with a lobster claw, so it is removable if desired in the future. A simple tie to finish it off seemed to suit the relaxed, boho look of the necklace.
Another idea I had was to embed smaller pieces of glass into clay. I decided on natural clay, because it seemed to suit the natural nature of the beach glass.
I picked up a stylized heart cookie cutter during the Valentine’s season. I loved how my heart turned out, with the pieces of green glass, seed beads, and a bit of glitter, but I easily saw that it was a bit too big and heavy to be a pendant. So I decided to hang it on a Christmas tree decoration hanger (I’m using supplies from all seasons here!). I added a complementary stylized silver heart for a bit of metallic shine.
I saw, in my collection, two pieces of glass that had a subtle heart shape to them, so I embedded them in clay also, and surrounded them with blue glass seed beads, to look with the water. When the pendants were done, somehow they didn’t seem finished enough for me just as they were. They needed something behind them, maybe because I had made them quite thick.
I saw a butterfly sitting in a bowl on my coffee table, and noticed that the colours in the wings looked beautiful with my pendant. So I just went with my flow of creativity and mounted wings on the back of my pendant, adding a bit more stiffness and shine with a layer of subtle glitter glue on the back of them.
I realized that it now too was a decor item, not a pendant, as originally intended, so added a hook to it as well. I did the other heart pendant with another butterfly.
So that’s been my learning curve in working with clay. 🙂
Tamara Summers
Pink Pearls and Potpourri
