Blue Hedgehogs

This wouldn’t really be my blog if it didn’t have at least two posts about hedgehogs, would it! (If you don’t know me and/or haven’t read the previous Hedgehogs blog and About page of this website: I love hedgehogs. Just a bit.)

For Hedgehog Awareness Week 2023, I partnered with Prickles and Paws Hedgehog Rescue to raise money for their amazing work (which includes caring for sick and injured hedgehogs, and building Cornwall’s first ‘proper’ hedgehog hospital).

They asked me to come up with a special Limited Edition design for them to sell alongside my popular rainbow hedgehog wall hangings. Their colour scheme is blue, so I proposed and prototyped a hedgehog using a blue swirly patterned glass (with a few plain translucent blue spines thrown in for good measure and extra blueness).

This is the first time I’d used a patterned glass for hedgehog spines and I was a little worried the swirliness of the pattern would be lost once it was cut down to little triangles - but actually I think it turned out really well!

And so did the supporters of Prickles and Paws!! They were amazing: we really are a nation of hedgehog lovers.

They ordered lots and lots of gorgeous blue hedgehogs (and a good few cheerful rainbow ones too), and I was kept very busy for a couple of weeks, making them all and sending them out. I cut and washed the spines in massive batches and dried them in the airing cupboard - I’ve learnt the hard way that even a tiny bit of dampness in the kiln can cause havoc, but there was no way I’d have been able to clean and dry each spine individually by hand when I had this many to deal with!

I blunted several drill bits, drilling all the holes for the hanging ribbon, and at one point I was worried I would run out of the clear background glass - I hadn’t anticipated this many orders! I even enlisted my 8-year-old one Saturday, to help me make a batch of paws. (He loves to use the glass-snapping tool, and I don’t often let him!)

I worked out that I could fit seven wall hangings on my kiln shelf at a time, so that limited me to seven each day because the kiln takes well over 12 hours to do its thing and cool down again. The weather was kind to me: the sun was shining and the solar panels were generating lots of electricity, so I tried to have the kiln full by lunchtime each day so that I could use it to my best advantage. I certainly didn’t have to turn the heating on at all: the room had barely cooled below 30°C by the time the kiln was on again each time! It’s a good thing I like a bit of warmth. Beats an air-conditioned office hands down!

Eventually, they were all ready to go off to their new homes. I spent surprisingly many hours tying ribbons and packing boxes - it all adds up and I wasn’t charging for my time to make these hedgehogs, so I’m glad to have raised a good sum of money for the charity. And hopefully my hedgehogs will put a smile on their owners’ faces too!

If you’re interested in seeing more about how I make my fused glass hedgehog wall hangings, here’s a “making of” video I posted on my YouTube channel last year. I quite enjoy making things in batches - it lets me find efficiencies and streamline the process (though I’ll be glad to have a little break from making hedgehogs and try out some other things just at the moment!). One day, I think I’ll write a blog post about batch baking.

The video doesn’t show the whole other process involved in making the feet, noses and eyes - they go through the kiln separately beforehand to form the nice rounded shapes that I can then include when I’m putting each hedgehog together. It took quite a lot of experimentation to settle on my final ‘recipe’ for each component - and even now, there’s variation in each one. That’s the nature (and joy!) of handcrafted work.

For now, I’ve got to go off and finish preparing for my first craft fair. I wonder how many hedgehogs I’ll sell there! Obviously not any Limited Edition blue ones though - just my standard rainbow and monochrome varieties.