Glass Votive Candle Holders

Now that Christmas and a few January birthday gifts have been given, I can post some recent projects. Today, I am showing some votive candles that I made for two in my extended family.

In November, I completed a four panel fused glass project for my sister-in-law. After making this four seasons picture, I decided to make a matching votive candle that had the four seasons depicted on sides of the glass.

First, I fused together two pieces of clear glass to form the main part of the votive. Next, was to add the trees. Since the votive candle was small, the trees would need to be made from something other than traditional fused glass – that glass would be too thick.

Option 1. Bend brown stringer to look like a tree. I tried this but never could get two trees to look alike.

Option 2. Draw trees with Glassline paint I thought about it and wanted to try something that would look better than hand drawn.

Option 3. Cut trees out of fusible transfer paper.

This is the option I decided to go with. A few years ago, I had used transfer paper to make a sign for another sister-in-law’s kitchen. While printed black, the iron oxide in the toner fuses to the glass with a nice sepia tone. This brown color should work nicely for trees.

Using an older model black laser printer (the toner cartridge needs to have a high iron content), I printed a black square on the Photo Transfer Paper.

Then, I used a paper punch in the shape of a tree to make four tree shaped transfers. Each punched image was then transferred to the four corners of the glass and allowed to dry.

Using medium and fine frit in various colors, the ground and leaves were added to the trees.

Around the same time, I decided to make a votive to match the “Cook’s Kitchen” sign. For this I made grape vines using the tree punch but cutting off some of the branches and turning the direction of the tree. Green confetti glass was used for the leaves and medium weight purple frit was used for the grapes.