People assume glass like this is poured or blown. It isn’t. Pâte de verre just means “paste of glass” — you build the whole thing out of powder, by hand, and the kiln does the rest. This is how one of these little tiles actually gets made, start to finish.
1 · Start with powder
The glass arrives ground down to a powder — somewhere between flour and fine sand, sorted by color. Finer powder gives that soft, matte, candy-like surface; coarser grains come out more glassy and clear. Most of what I use is the fine stuff, because I like the powdery look.
2 · Mix it into a paste
On its own, powder won’t hold a shape, so I wet it with a little binder — basically a drop of glue in water — until each color turns into a thick paste, like wet sugar. The binder is just temporary; it burns away in the kiln and leaves nothing behind. It’s only there to make the powder stay where I put it.
3 · Pack the mold — in reverse
Now the slow part. I press the paste into a little mold, color by color, with a tiny tool and my fingers. The trick is that you work backwards: the very first powder you lay against the mold is the surface you’ll see at the end. So I have to think in reverse — place the top layer first, the background last. Packing tight matters: loose powder comes out full of holes, well-packed powder comes out solid and heavy.
4 · Into the kiln, and let go
Then it goes in the kiln and I lose all control, which is the hard part. It heats up slowly (rush it and it cracks), holds at the temperature where the grains soften and fuse together, then cools back down slowly so the glass doesn’t crack later from the stress. The key is to melt it just enough — enough for the powder to become one solid piece, but not so much that it flows flat and loses the texture and color I packed in.
5 · Wait a day. Open it.
And then you wait. You can’t peek, can’t fix anything, can’t undo. A full day later the kiln is cool and you open it and finally see what you actually made. After years of code — weightless, endless undo — I love that glass makes you wait and means it.
The whole craft really comes down to one quiet thing: how much air stays trapped inside. Powder is mostly air; the firing slowly squeezes it out. Stop early and you keep that soft, sugary, lit-from-inside look; push hotter and it turns heavier and clearer. Those tiny bubbles that never left aren’t a mistake — they’re the whole look. It’s air I decided to keep.
These four
The Mondrian one stayed crisp because I packed the colors tight so they wouldn’t bleed. The deep maroon tile kept its herringbone because I stopped it just before it melted flat. The blue is calm and solid; the little bird is my favorite accident. None of them are perfect — that’s kind of the point. Made by hand, not by prompt. ♡