A couple of weeks ago we went to Chicago and Detroit to visit our friends and family. We were going to stay at our friends' place and I had to come up with a hostess gift, a real gift, that would go along with the customary bottle of wine. I decided to make a platter and a set of coasters they could use rather than give someting store-bought.
I picked three kinds of red glass: an opaque, a transparent, and a textured streaky one, and put them into a checkered pattern for the coasters. Then I made a platter in the same pattern adding stripes of clear glass to make it look lighter. I liked the end result, and so did my kids and, most important, my friends I gave this set to.