Here’s a fun video of me attempting to try something new in the world of mosaics: pulling my own glass filati! So exciting to try something new!! I created these rings to be a part of mosaic artist Rachel Sager's ongoing, epic mosaic installation, The Ruins Project. It is an awesome project, so please check out her site or even visit if you can!
Video transcript for deaf or hard of hearing:
Hi Mosaic Fans! Today I’m going to show you my experiment into something totally new! As a mosaic artist, I love to try new things, and recently an opportunity came up to expand my skillset.
There is an amazing mosaic artist, Rachel Sager, in Pennsylvania. I had the pleasure of meeting her over ten years ago at a mosaic conference. I love her mosaic art, and she is working on an epic mosaic work called the Ruins Project. Rachel, along with other artists, is creating mosaic installations on the walls of an abandoned coal mine on her property.
One of these projects involves having many mosaic artists make rings, each one of an individual color study, and she will arrange them to create what she describes as a “wide swath of graduating color”. The “rules” to this project is that the rings have to be made with filati, which is glass that is melted and pulled to create a long string, then cut apart and used on end. It’s the kind of glass mosaic artists use to make micromosaics. As my sister helpfully pointed out, they’re called stringers in glass fusing. This information helped a lot with my Googling!
I had to get in on this project, so Rachel sent me six rings, I bought a torch, got advice from a few friends and my sister, and got started melting glass!!
For reference, here is a completed ring with a penny to show how tiny these mosaic fillati rings are.
In this first video I am starting with Orsoni smalti. It is glass from a company in Venice, Italy, and I have a ton of it left over from a commission. This glass is poured into large “pizzas”, or “tortillas” if you buy Mexican smalti. Usually these pizzas are cut into bars, and then the bars are broken into rectangular pieces, and the artist uses the rough cut interior to create a mosaic because this interior cut has the most shine, texture, and vivid color. This is called the ‘A’ cut.
I was using this glass on the ‘B’ side, using a wet saw to sculpt the pieces for the mosaic. I was left with a bunch of very expensive scrap glass that doesn’t have much use to me. Melting it down to make filati seems like an amazing use of the leftover glass!
I also wanted to try using stained glass, because I have a lot of that around as well. This is a bar of stained glass. It doesn’t have air bubbles like the smalti, so it’s less likely to snap from the temperature change, and it’s easier to grip with just needle nose pliers instead of having to use locking pliers.
I really like the results from the stained glass too. In the end, when you see the brown ring, that is stained glass, and the other five are smalti.
For most of the rings, I cut the glass as I worked because there is less waste this way. Because I’m new to this, I had to work really hard for each millimeter of filati, but it also took forever to go between cutting and placing the glass. For these last two, I decided to just take an hour or so and pre-cut it. The thinner pieces need more stability, so I cut them about 1 cm, the wider pieces can be more shallow.
I used Apoxie Sculpt to embed the glass into the rings. It is a waterproof bonding clay that comes in a variety of colors. Rachel requested black, and since that’s what I usually use it worked out perfectly.
I wish I had taken a time-lapse video of one of the brighter colors I used because you could have seen it a lot better. I was busy experimenting and learning and forgot to set up the tripod.
Overall I loved pulling glass and making mosaics with filati. I would do a lot of it if I had enough room in my studio to set up a dedicate area for it. I would just buy stringers, but what intrigued me most about this process was getting the different shapes and sizes by pulling my own glass.
Here are the final rings. My favorites are the first and last, which are the aquamarine and the brown. Thank you for watching!