Not So Crabby After All

As a novice warmglass artist, I have quickly learned that glass sometimes just becomes what it wants to be! A case in point:

I recently had this inspiration to create a set of small sushi plates using a beach theme. My inspiration came from a mosaic countertop I did at our beach house last summer.

The plan was to fuse the blue crabs (and, red shrimp on other plates in the set) and slump them into a sushi mold to make a set of salad plates. The first step in a project like this is to fuse a layer of the base glass (in this case, white) to a layer of clear. That takes several hours, so while waiting for it to "cook", I meticulously cut all of the small glass pieces to form the crab. Imagine my displeasure when I opened the kiln to discover a gigantic crater in the base. I was thinking that food wouldn't stay too well in a plate with a 2 inch hole in it, so I had to go to Plan B...I just didn't know what Plan B was yet! Now was when I would have to use that creativity I was always hounding my students about. After several days of pondering, I decided that it obviously didn't want to be a plate, so I cleaned up the hole, fused the adorable crab on it, crossed my fingers and put it back in the kiln. My crab sushi plate is now a votive holder. It's not exactly what I wanted, but, hey! It grew up to be what it wanted to be. It turned out to be a happy accident, and now I'm not so crabby anymore!