Chapter 12 the proposal

Many thanks to all those who contributed to the last post, your comments helped me a lot, when making my decision as to which design I will take forward for the final 3D project, it's going to be the wishing flags. I think that it will be more appropriate to refer to it as a wishing piece (later it will have a title) as the word prayer feels rather presumptive.

As this is to be a 3D functional item I have decided to make it inter-reactive.

I would like to produce this piece to be exhibited and thereby seen and used by members of the public. My plan is to use some of the flags as purely decorative and then those that people can write their wishes on.

Equally this piece could be used in the home by a single user or others, on a daily/weekly basis.



In the LHS of my sketch book entry I've made a couple of ideas as to how the flags could be supported and the top one would have holes drilled in the driftwood, with a little decorative pot by the side for people to write a small message on. I would have to consider the safety aspect of the flag supports and make sure they were not dangerous.

The second option may be better with wooden supports as in my trial piece.

The flags that are in situ will be highly decorative and I'm planning to use the Designer Plus software to create more fills that will catch the light and give a more 3d appearance.

I am keen to work with a friend who works with glass fusion pieces and as you will see from the RHS page I could have her make me a base using glass frit, which gives a lovely lace like finish. This is quite fragile and would mean allowing people to write their wishes on the flags and I would place them if the piece was on exhibition.

Another idea is to fuse embroidered piece in the glass and we have tried one sample so far, but as I'd used polyester thread on a base of nylon sheer the whole piece disappeared before her eyes as she started the firing.
But we plan to do more samples using copper mesh with silver wire as a stitching medium. I'm also going to try stitching silver thread on gold leaf, which doesn't melt but leaves a black outline.



I'm very keen to see if we can make this work as there doesn't seem to be anything like it other than laminated glass where the fabric is trapped between two pieces of glass.

You may also have noticed that I've simplified the flag design to make writing on it easier and also the glass experiments need to be a simple shape, but this will probably change of course as I progress through the process.