Making lemonade, one tiny piece of frit at a time

My last post (Oops or Trying to Find the Opportunity) explains why I had a large bin of shattered glass and why I am working on better ways to move my finished pieces.  It has taken some time  for me to really work on this opportunity with results that might be worth pursuing.

First I had to find a way to make the shattered pieces stop resembling their former selves.  When I wrote the last post I had visions of quick and easy pieces where I just threw the shards together into fascinating patterns, did  a single fuse and had a masterpiece.  After playing with the big pieces for a while I concluded that they remained too much like parts of broken artwork and not enough like components for use in a new piece of art.  So I started smashing them.  The business end of crowbar did wonders (please don't try this at home without a LOT of safety gear!).

 I smashed until I didn't see the original pieces mocking me.  I had an assortment of sizes and then began to try to make that glorious masterpiece.

Not a a bad first try, but it felt forced.  Had I started this design from scratch I would have had sizes that I chose rather than what came out of my workout, so I stepped back for a few days.  This piece is not permanently in the frame, I think I'm going to slump it and see if I get something that suits it better.

I let this percolate in the back of my mind for a week, and tonight I began smashing with a plan.  I found various household products to use as large scale sifters and now I have medium pieces, small pieces and rainbow frit.

I have a bunch of experiments loaded into my kiln... tomorrow night I find out if any of them are opportunity knocking... or if I have to go back to the drawing board.