Fused Wine Glass Angel

This project was born from a discussion during a Fusing with Bottle Glass class. We were trying to figure out how to make an angel with a fused wine glass. After a number of tries, here it is!

Materials:

Select your wine glass. I thought it would be fun to try different shapes of wine glass so I started with 3 different shapes of wine glasses. Read the whole tutorial before you start buying up wine glasses though, only one of these shapes worked well.

In addition to wine glasses you’ll need:

• glass cutter
• glass nippers
• grozier pliers
• running pliers
• marker
• small piece of fiber paper
• glass paint and brush – OPTIONAL

Step 1:

Mark the bottom off of the wine glasses. The easiest way to do this is to draw two semi straight lines across the bottom, avoiding the stem. Kind of an eye shape.

Step 2:

Cut the bottoms. This can be difficult, of the three wine glasses, the two shorter ones were very thick glass on the base, it made it difficult to cut the bottom off in 2 pieces. I find it easier to score the flat bottom of the wine glass foot, them use the running pliers to run the score. Use the grozier pliers to remove any pieces that don’t run cleanly. Chances are you’ll end up with multiple pieces, that’s okay. These crescents are going to be the wings of your angel.

Step 3:

Cut the remaining triangles off the base of the glass. The idea is to have a rough circle the size of the stem left. This is where the tile nippers may come in handy.

You may have guessed that this will be difficult for wine glasses with thick bases, and you’d be right. Thin wineglass stems and feet are where it’s at.

Step 4:

Make hanger/heart. The painting part of this step is optional, you can decide for yourself by looking at the final project if you think it adds anything. I’m going to detail it out here though, for folks who may want to add the heart.

Using one of the triangle pieces from the same wineglass (important if you’re doing a batch of angels), paint a heart on it with glass paint.

Once the heart is dry, you need to cut a thin strip of fiber paper (I’m using 1/32″ thick fiber paper) This is for the fused in hanger, so it just needs to be long enough to span across the heart piece and wide enough to accommodate monofiliment (or whatever you use).

**(in retrospect, I think I would use a nichrome heart shaped loop here, I’m not sure I like the fiber paper mark)

Step 5:

Make the head. This involves cutting off that little nub of wine glass foot using your tile nippers. Note that I had to use my saw on the brown glass because the foot was too thick to cut with nippers.

The remaining stem is going to be your angels neck, so if you don’t want a giraffe angel, nip that off to a more reasonable length. You can wait to do this until you lay out the angel and see what length makes sense.

Step 6:

Assemble the parts of your angel. I found it easiest to just do this on my prepared kiln shelf. First I put in the glass to see where things should be. It’s helpful to make little marks on the fiber paper to show where the glass is, it will make placing the wings much easier.

Take out the wineglass and position the wings, head and heart where they will be under the shoulder of the angel (bottom of the wineglass). This is a good time to decide how long the neck should be.

Put the wineglass back:

and here’s what it looks like from the top:

Here are our other two wineglasses ready to fuse also:

Step 7:

Fuse! I used the full fuse schedule for 1/4″ glass.

Results:

Looks good! Now, remove the fiber paper from the back and add a hanger and she’s ready to go. You could also add some wire wrapping and beads if you wished.

But wait! We had three angels, where are the other two?

Well…

My suggestion is to use tall, thin stemmed wine glasses for this project!