Playing around with glass stars

  I have quite of few of these glass stars left over from the holidays.  I made them to raise money for my PEO chapter's scholarship fund, and we made about $500 in December, which was a fabulous surprise for everyone, most of all me.  

I've been very curious what it would look like to fuse a star onto a piece of flat glass in order to end up with a coaster/trivet kind of thing, and I finally got around to trying it out.  I used a smaller and a larger star, each on 4" squares of glass. 

I used two layers of flat glass in order for the pieces to have a decent thickness - 

I kept the pieces in the kiln until the stars melted down enough to be quite flat.  The shape of the star kind of ballooned out as it flattened.  I was sorry to realize that the transparent yellow gets a bit lost in the clear glass, visually.  And the square needs to be larger than 4" in order for the star to melt in without pushing out the edges near the points - 

  

I made a second attempt, this time using white glass and making the square slightly larger.  The star obviously is more visible in this one.  And the star fits within the square better - 

Here are the four pieces from this experiment - 

I only had enough white glass for one square, so for a second one I used a thick strip of white glass with thin strips of clear at the top and the bottom to make a full square.  I like that one better, I do believe.  But I'm biased - I like anything with clear glass. 

I'm not sure whether we will want to pursue this idea much or not.  The stars take such a small amount of glass, so they have a small materials cost.  The double layer of flat glass increases that quite a bit, relatively speaking.  But it was a good way to use up some stars that were a little funky.

The glass star project - getting down to it

I've been making a lot of glass stars...

Glass star fundraiser

Here is an ornament/sun catcher that I came up with as a little fundraiser for my P.E.O. chapter.  P.E.O. is a women's organization that promotes/supports educating women.  Our chapter raises money every year to give away as scholarships to women for their post-high school education.  P.E.O. owns Cottey College, the two-year liberal arts college in Nevada, MO that I attended before I came back to the UW.  The gold star is a symbol of P.E.O., so that's the inspiration for this little project...

This is part of the display board that we took to the P.E.O. State Convention to drum up some orders.  We did get a few!  

Hope to sell more at a particular Seattle-area P.E.O. meeting in December.  Maybe on etsy, too.....