Hello again

Well here we are at the end of another year, well, almost.  I thought I’d use this blog post to tell you of one of our more unusual commissions which we undertook at the start of this year.

We were contacted by a lady who lives in a lovely flat which is virtually on the sea front.  She lives in the Garden Flat and wanted a house sign.  Our remit was that although it was called the Garden Flat, as it was right on the sea front, she wanted the design to be one of a ‘sea garden’. So with this in mind, we set to work.

As with all commissions, there is a certain amount of experimentation which needs to be done to decide what works best.  We fired several examples of the wording for example: we tried black paint to do the words, which looked alright but it wasn’t very dynamic to look at.  We then decided to make the letters out of glass and fire those onto the piece instead.  We also had to decide whether to do a full fuse, which would make the sign very flat, or a tack fuse, which would give it a more 3-D effect.  We tried both and without a doubt, the tack fuse worked best of all.

I made glass shells and a starfish to tack on to the sign.  We also created a lovely effect of sea foam by using clear glass frit.  We were very pleased with the finished result, which is shown below.  Our customer was absolutely delighted with it, which is obviously the most important thing!

Commissions can be quite testing as you really want to get the best result for the customer as you can.  There is obviously a certain amount of our pride at stake too!  But you can also learn so much from doing a commission.  Since we completed the house sign, we then used a similar theme to create a free-standing piece of art, which has gone down very well at the shows we’ve done this year.  

The photo on the right shows the sign fused, and ready to go.  The photo on the left is of the piece in-situ.  We really love the reflection it creates on the wall as the sun shines through it. 

This picture below shows how we adapted aspects of the commission into another piece of art.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Tina for choosing us to make her house sign.  We really enjoyed doing it and in creating it, it has opened up many opportunities to make other pieces of art.

So, if you’re reading this and feel inspired to have something unique made, please contact us!