My name is Judith Hannington and I live in West Wales on the Carmarthenshire / Ceredigion border overlooking the beautiful Teifi valley. I have always enjoyed crafting and love exploring the versatility of different mediums. Trying my hand at stained glass many years ago is when I first fell in love with the amazing medium of glass.
Yes, I am a bit mad about glass - I love every aspect of working with it, with perhaps the exception of some elements of coldworking!! I am continually experimenting with different designs and techniques to make both functional and decorative items and relish that first peek into the kiln once a firing cycle is complete. I find the process of working with glass completely absorbing and am constantly amazed how such a fragile material can be manipulated in so many different ways - it grabs all of my attention in a way that no other material ever has.
My journey into warm glass techniques began through my work with a publishing company to do a series of features for a craft magazine with a microwave kiln. This tiny kiln had a circular working area of just 8cm diameter but I was so excited by the results of melting little pieces of sheet glass in a ‘kiln’ that even with its variable output I was completely hooked!
Through that same work I was then introduced to a lampworker making glass beads and my journey with torchwork began in earnest in the summer of 2010. My bead and cabochon designs were often inspired by nature, but their shape and form were also simply the result of enjoyable hours spent playing with molten glass. Requiring a kiln for annealing my beads led me back to using sheet glass to explore fusing and slumping and this inevitably led to the need for dedicated kilns for both individual techniques although I now spend the majority of my time fusing.
