This has been a top secret project!! Well, no one would have been harmed if it had leaked out, but it was for a gift that might have spoiled a surprise.
My wife and I worked on this panel together from concept to fruition. I was concerned the whole time that we were trying techniques we'd never tried and yet had a time line and no time to experiment. We could not mess this up!!!
So my record keeping has suffered, due to our time lines and doing some things on the fly, but this is the general way we did this panel. First, I did a full fuse of the sky blue that had some nice subtle coloring differences in it. Then I cut the palm trees out and we arranged them and laid down multi-colored blue frits and we did a contour fuse. I did it slightly less time and temp than the spectrum schedule. then we laid down our sandy frits and some more of the blue water frit and cloud white frit and did a tack fuse.
We did not like the way the sand came out, too many dark spots. So then we placed some more of the sandy colored frit on and did another tack fuse.
In between each of these firings I ground down the panel side to be able to fit the stand that we purchased.
Lessons learned form this project. When doing frit on the edge of a panel use some type of dam so that we do not have to try to ground off so much fused frit. Keep better records!! even on time pressure items. Wash cut pieces better! You may not be able to see it, but the leaves have some black lines around the edges that were there for cutting, but I failed to wash off completely. Luckily, in this application, they look nice and add something to the piece. File that one under happy accident.
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