Hello! Thanks for stopping to peruse Love Fused!

At 34, I was effectively shut down by pain. As a mother of 2 young girls, living my dream of running my own upscale resale shop, I was forced to consider what was really important to me.

I had previously enjoyed working and playing hard in local nonprofit organizing and fundraising while building a dream house and farming an heirloom organic garlic business with my love. I did it all and health paid the price.

The blessing in disguise was that my health challenges caused me to strip down and examine my reality and recoup my quality of life. A life that I am now delighted to claim as my own.

The journey taught me to prioritize a blue-sky bike ride, snuggling with my girls, dark chocolate, a yummy nap and simple delights. That delight led me to combine my blossoming respect for holistic health with my new found appreciation of the many real women who struggle to balance it all and are all superwomen in their own right.

I’m inspired by my friends, these women around me who are teachers, artists, healers, scientists, mothers, writers, organizers and farmers. They juggle so much every day to make the world a better place in their own way. They often put themselves at the bottom of the priority list and often don’t even know how amazing they are.

I celebrate them and hope to add delight to their day. As they put on a heart necklace they can reminded that they are loved, as they glance at a glass flower they remember that there is always beauty blossoming. Even if they are tired, they can feel sexy donning luscious earrings or watching a sunrise through a glass window hanging.

My unconventional approach to fused glass jewelry and art strives to create love tokens that nurture and celebrate these women’s souls and delights, reminding them how fabulous they are and lifting them up in their adventures.

I design vibrant, fun and flattering love tokens with a hint of feisty inspired by love, nature, color and luxurious textures for real life super women who deserve to be celebrated as they are!

ABOUT THE GLASS
I hand cut original designs from art and dichroic glass. After I have cut and shaped the pieces for the design, the piece is heated in an electric kiln that warms the glass to up to 1475 degrees.

It’s a delicate process that requires the glass to be heated, soaked twice at specific temperatures and cooled in a very controlled rate. If the glass is heated or cooled too fast it can crack, crumble, break, or bubble. So the electric temperature gauge has a very important job!

Each firing process takes 20-28 hours to complete. Flat pieces, like window hangings, are usually fired once. However, any pieces that have three-dimensional shape have been fired at least twice: one firing to adhere the glasses to each other and another firing to give the three-dimensional shape of a bowl or platter.

It’s so fun to mix together a variety of types of glass. Cathedral glass is the one you can see light through, whereas opaque is the glass you can’t see through, and dichroic has the super metallic colors and textures. Because dichroic glass was originally designed for space flight, it’s extremely expensive and often used sparingly. But like good chocolate, it’s hard to be too stingy with it because it’s so beautiful!

The dichroic glass also has two types, one allows light to shine through, or clear, and the other that light doesn’t show through, opaque. The clear dichroic glass is really fascinating because it will show one color when the light is shining on it and a completely different color when the light is shining from behind it. It really is magical!!!

Thank you for taking the time to check out the results of my delight!

Elsie Winne Edstrom