New Jobs for a Pair of French Doors

by Dorothea

5 Materials

$65.00

6 Weeks

Medium

We needed a screen door for the studio (garage)........

This what we started with........

A plain old French door..... original clear glass still in place.

First we carefully removed the trim on the back side of each pane of glass. Painfully slow to do, but worth taking care. Then we needed to clean and repaint.

Screen door complete

I made 4 panels using fused glass and designs that I thought would make the door attractive and showcase my fusing studio. Kerry then cut thin strips of from wooden pallets he has been reclaiming for another project, painted them to match and once the fused glass panels were in place he used an air stapler with 3/4" nails to hold them in place and keep the glass panels secure.

A closer look at the fused glass panels

We really liked how this came together and we did buy a pair of doors...... so we decide to make a 2nd door for the office in our home

Some memorable life moments in glass

The 2nd door required 15 panels to be made - it took time and thought, but it came together wonderfully. Each of the colored panels depict something special from our lives. To make the panels I cut the glass to size, fused the base which consisted of a thin clear panel and then a regular thickness layer in color or clear as needed. All the embellishments were prepared earlier were then glued on the base and "tack" fused. I did use a few precuts (flowers) but mostly I cut out with a Gemini Taurus ring saw for cutting out the horses and joined hearts, maple leaves. The butterflies were cast using glass frit.

Same door, photo taken with flash

We plan on doing similar panels on two more doors which we recently purchased at Habitat for Humanity. One for the bathroom and one for our bedroom. Luckily our home is small and we have open plan and few doors!!!!!

The price noted below is for the screen door, as are the materials.

I would estimate a cost of $65 - 95 per panel

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Used french doors (Garage Sales)
Fused glass panels (made them myself)
Screening (Home Hardware)
White oil-based paint-we had been told that the original paint on the first two doors had been paint (Menards, Port Huron)
96 coe glass (sheets, frit, stringers, noodles and all glass tools (Delphi Glass, Lansing, Michigan)

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Frequently asked questions

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2 questions

Dawn Renee' Lemons Freeman on Aug 18, 2016
What is the process of doing/making "fused glass"?

4
Judy on Aug 18, 2016
Not sure how I missed this if it's here, but where do you talk about the actual screen door? This is lovely, and the panels are inspired, but even though you list screening and talk about a screen door, I don't see one, and I re-read this several times, but nothing is said about it in the steps for making the beautiful glass panels. Yikes! What did I miss?

5

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2 of 76 comments

Dorothea on May 05, 2017

Finally, the bathroom and bedroom doors are complete, you can guess which one is which!!!!!! Next project will be a new board for the master bedroom.
Just love doing these.

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OceeB on Mar 07, 2020

Wow... love your creativity.. Oh to have space and a kiln would be so much fun.

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