Rhoades Family Arts

Dan and I took the most fabulous trip to Alexandria, Virginia, where we stayed with Dan's sister, Lauri, and her husband, Jerry. Lauri and Jerry have some unique interests and skills. Lauri has kilns and fuses glass to make beautiful bowls, pendants, beads, lampshades and more. Jerry makes gorgeous kitchen cutting boards.

They allowed me to take some pictures while they were creating. Here Lauri is measuring a piece of glass that will become a pendant.

Here she is cutting another piece of glass to make another pendant. She can fuse 6 pendants at a time in her little kiln.

She cuts little pieces of white paper to put under the glass before heating the glass in the kiln. She gave a very thorough explanation of what the paper does, but I can't remember it enough to explain it here. She really knows her stuff and teaches classes on this.

Here are 6 potential pendants. They have two or three layers of glass, depending on the result we were looking for.  She let me choose the glass since these are for me! They have butterflies, dragonflies and other interesting designs in them.

The kiln gets as hot as 1600 degrees Fahrenheit.

Here is the end result. Bales will be applied with glue and they will need to dry for 24 hours.

She let me make two batches! What a nice sis-in-law!

Aren't they pretty?

I love to just touch their smoothness and play with them besides wear them! Notice all the different kinds of bales - so cool!

We were especially excited at how this one with the leaves turned out. As I mentioned earlier, you can layer two or three pieces of glass and with this one we just used two and didn't put a clear piece on top of the leaves. I can't wait to wear it this fall!

Here I am modeling one of them in one of my iPhone self portraits - lol!

Actually, the main reason we took this trip was to pick up our custom order for our son's upcoming wedding. The order started out with the bowls to float candles in, but with the extra glass Lauri made coaster/candle holders and yes, you see it - pendants. Aren't they gorgeous?

We tested the bowls while we were there.

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Ok, now here is something I got even more excited about because I hadn't seen it before!

Lauri put used wine bottles (and other liquor bottles too) in her large kiln where they flattened out to make cheese boards! When we shopped at the National Harbor Mall there, I did see some in an exclusive shop, but I haven't seen them here locally. I can't say I have shopped much here though, so maybe they are here too. I love the smooth texture of the bottle top and bottom humps!

I am thinking I may be asking the bartender at our upcoming wedding to save me some bottles so we can make some wine bottle cheese board mementos!

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Here Jerry is sanding a cutting board in the next room. I had no idea there was so much sanding involved in making a cutting board. He laid out all of his cutting boards so our son could pick one for his wedding gift. It's amazing what Facebook can do for out of town shopping. The nieces and nephews love receiving a cutting board from Jerry when they get married.

Here he is applying tung oil to protect the wood.

Here are some of his finished cutting boards.

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And finally (I know this is a long post, but I have so much to share!), we shopped in Old Town Alexandria and had to take a picture of this and send it to Ashleigh because sometimes I call her "Lou" or "Lou Lou". I don't know why I call her that...it just happened at some point in time.

And we shopped at the National Harbor shops and I thought this clock was really neat.

Also, I am seeing birds on things.

Morena's Corner gives a great tutorial on making a bird sitting on a birdbath using dollar store items.

Thanks for visiting! Hope you enjoyed this long post!