These wall vases are so cute and whimsical, you may not guess how easy they are to make.
Materials:
Wine bottle with a long neck
ruler
marker
glass cutter of your choice
Drill/Dremel tool
Wire
Kiln with prepared shelf
Starting with a wine bottle (or partially cut bottle from a previous project) measure from the opening of the bottle down 5” or so (this is a personal preference thing) and mark all the way around.
Cut on this line using the bottle chopping method of your choice. Clean edges and make sure they are free of chips.
We’re going to create the ‘vase’ portion using two layers of 1/8″ thick fiber paper. Since all of our bottle necks vary slightly in size and shape, we’ll cut them to fit.
Trace the first bottle neck onto the fiber paper, making sure you plan for the top edge to extend above the top edge of the glass.
Trace down each side, the fiber paper is going to need to be slightly smaller than the glass in order to fit inside.
After you have a basic shape traced, cut it out and see if it fits into the bottle neck. The paper needs to extend from the open end of the glass, but needs to end short of the mouth of the bottle.
Once we have a good fit, use the first piece of fiber paper as a pattern to cut additional pieces. If you are using multiple bottles of the same shape, you could make a master pattern that would speed up the process of tracing and cutting multiple identical inserts.
Insert both pieces of fiber paper in the bottle neck and place it on a prepared kiln shelf to fuse. Your results will be the most even if you can make sure the fiber paper insert is relatively parallel to the kiln shelf. As the bottle neck flattens, the fiber paper will create a vase space inside the bottle neck. Fire at a full fuse. If you get excessive needling on the cut edge of the vase, lower your top temperature by 20-25 degrees on the next batch.
After vase is fired, remove fiber paper, drill a hole on either side of the vase.
Embellish with wire and beads if you wish. Now that you have the technique down, you can expand into other variations, including sandblasting or etching the finished vases, or adding a plaster element on top of the fiber paper inside the vase (similar to the plaster embellishment on the lid of the trinket boxes). Remember that this element will have to be broken down to be removed, so try to use a relatively flat element that will easily degrade.
Here I have added curled brass wire to the green vase, a beaded wire on the blue vase, and raffia with bone beads on the yellow vase.