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Once a month, I attend the Anglian Bead Group in Colchester. It's a seed bead group but I went because I think some of the techniques are useful for my lampwork beads, particularly if I make some lampies up into jewellery. Last meeting, we were discussing what project to do for the next session and someone suggested a cabochon beading tutorial as one of the members had brought in a malachite type pendant with green seed beads made from a kit bought from Pandorion.

Pendant used as a cabochon with seed beads.

Fused and combed pendant with white matt seed beads.

The Silicon Folly Glass site fusing forum in USA has recently had a glass exchange where each person taking part makes a number of 2x2 inch pieces of fused glass with a different theme each year. These are then sent to a central collection point and that person then repacks the individual pieces so that each person that has taken part recieves one of each of the pieces made by the other people. When the images are available, I'll put in a link so that you can see all this Christmas' efforts.
I didn't take part but have been doing some fusing tests of my own.

This is a test piece using mostly Bullseye glass. It's about 2.5 inches square and because I used some tiny pieces of non-compatible glass (I did't have the colour I wanted in the compatible i.e.same C.O.E. glass), it's in imminent danger of cracking. But I just wanted to try this method and was quite pleased with the result. One step nearer to getting it perfect.

This piece has been combed but is not yet finished. I intend to put a border around it and cap it with clear to make it sparkle. I'm undecided whether to turn it into a bowl or not.

This started out as three tiny pot melts in Bullseye Fusible glass which looked very nondescript when taken out of the kiln. Not content with these, I placed two of them back in a pot and left the other on a kiln shelf placed so that the melt would drop onto the pre-existing one. These were all done on fibre paper, not thinfire. I still didn't like the result nor the finish on the back of the resulting piece. The fibre paper seemed to have stopped the glass from flowing smoothly across the kiln shelf. After a few weeks deliberation during which time I got on with other melts,I decided to take one last shot at it and cut extra pieces of glass to go around the mishapen melt, added a few stringers and some extra pieces of glass and fused at 940 deg cent so that I could also add a few combs in the glass to make the plainer areas more interesting. Click on the picture to get an enlargement. I intend to cut this into a circle and put a darker border around it so that in my mind at least, it qualifies as finished.

Pot melt of mainly Spectrum clear waterglass with tiny pieces of accent colours