Halloween Sale!

From October 17-31, members of the Etsy Jewelry Design and Supply Shops street team will be holding an amazing Great Halloween Bash sale! Many of our shops will be participating, with a variety of sales and discounts available. This is a great opportunity to pick up a few items for Christmas and save some money at the same time!

To see a complete list of participating stores and their promotions go to http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5858047

Examining and Evaluating

in my last blog post, I talked about my idea to create my own sheet of custom-colored glass by fusing together opal frit with clear frit and bits of scrap glass. I thought it would be a cool way to develop a piece of glass that I couldn't buy from a supplier and that would be just what I had in mind. Well, my first fused plate attempt is finished--with no bubbles or other major kiln malfunctions this time, thank goodness--but while the completed plate is nice and all, the result isn't quite what I had in mind, either, so I'm going to have to put the old thinking cap back on and try to come up with another approach.

Having tried this whole make-my-own-sheet-of-glass idea, I've decided that the look I'm really working for is a plate-sized pot melt, which may not really be possible with a kiln the size of mine. One of my books on glass fusing describes a fairly complicated-looking framework of hot damz, kiln furniture, homemade fiber paper mold and heavy screen to make a plate-sized pot melt. It looked really complicated to me when I read through the directions, but it is probably what I'm going to have to try to get the look I want...either that or running the kiln up really hot and doing some open-kiln combing or swirling or something like that. (My face gets hot just thinking about it!) The mental image for what I'm hoping to attain involves something much more smooth and marble-like than the result I got in this first experiment. In this attempt, the little bits of colored frit that I thought would melt and smooth out into a swoop of color just didn't do that. They remained small, square, frit-shaped and crumb-looking instead! Not at all the effect I was looking for.

You can see the first kiln shot of the square fiber mold and the layered frit in the blog post just below this one. I had swirls of opal frit layered under clear with bits and pieces of coordinating colored scraps of glass on top of that. Thinking that part over, it may have been better to put all of the colored bits and frit underneath the clear, but that's how we learn, right? Here's the second kiln shot...

You can see the inner square that resulted from what I put in the mold...clear and opal frit with flecks of color in a lace-like rounded square. After I washed that up and removed the tiny little areas of kilnwash that had stuck on the back, I laid it over a piece of red and clear streaky glass that I cut to the same size and shape as the sushi plate mold. Another piece of learning...I should have cut that about two blade widths narrower. I put step two through a full fuse cycle to marry the two separate pieces together--still kind of hoping for some smoothing out of the frit. The full fuse came out just fine, other than no smoothing out of the opal frit, no lovely casual swirls of opal color soaked into the streaky and clear red behind. Sigh.

To complete the plate-building process, I put the resulting square of glass back in the kiln a third time, laid over the top of my new sushi plate mold. I stacked the plate mold up off the kiln shelf with some kiln furniture, made sure the air hole was open (!) and ran that through a slumping cycle. It slumped perfectly...no bubbles...only one little lipped edge where the glass square was apparently just a little bit bigger than the mold. I don't have a glass saw or a separate grinder...just a Dremel with grinding bits...so I may or may not try to get that edge off. It could just be a little idiosyncrasy that marks it as my first experiment and a reminder to aim for a blank that is just slightly smaller than the mold!

And here it is, after three firings and hours and hours of cooling........Now I just have to figure out how to buff out the bottom to make it smooth rather than scratchy...... It's OK, really, I know that...but it doesn't match up with the picture I had in my head, so for me it was a learning experience but not a resounding success. Food for thought, I guess...and fodder for my next creative experiment!!

Forging Ahead!

Call me crazy, but even after all of the kiln maladies I've had in the last couple of weeks, I'm experimenting once again! I bought some molds from a fellow Etsyian a few weeks ago and have been eager to try them out ever since. I had a couple of special requests to complete before I could do that, though, which took a bit of time now that I'm back at work for another school year, so today is the first opportunity I've had to get it going. One of the molds that I bought is a sushi plate...nice squarish shape, shallow curve...a very modern look that I really like. The problem was, I had an idea that had been brewing in my mind of what I wanted in a first plate attempt, and none of the glass I have in the studio really worked. So, rather than buying more glass, waiting for it to arrive and then playing around with that, I decided to go ahead and try to make my own custom square of glass using a fiber paper mold.

Now, I'm new to fusing and there may be really good reasons why one shouldn't do this, but being a relative novice, I don't know what they are until I try. (Sometimes things are much less stressful this way!! Until you open the kiln to a disaster, at least.) Using the plate mold as a pattern, I cut a fiber paper mold out of a sheet of 1/4" thick fiber paper that I have on hand. I trimmed the corners to fit so they wouldn't extend out too close to the heating elements and then filled the space up with two different colors of opal frit, swirling it around in a random pattern with my paintbrush, then followed that with a thicker layer of clear. Once I had the base colors set up and the area covered over really well, I evened it out using a small sheet of glass for a straight edge and started adding embellishments. You can see the flecks and chunks of color in the picture above. It doesn't look too exciting here, but keep in mind that there are swirls of opal frit buried underneath the clear that will all melt in together and hopefully stretch out a bit in the finished piece. Depending on the thickness of the glass once it's done firing, I may need to refire it again with a sheet of thin clear added in. That's OK with me, since I may want to add more embellishment at the same time once I see what happens here.

Then, since I like to make good use of a firing when I can, I spread out some red opal frit along the edge of the fiber paper to make some fused "lace". I hope to use it in some upcoming holiday pendants or tiles if it turns out well. I read about this technique when I was browsing through some online fusing projects, but didn't have good luck with it when I actually followed the directions and gave it a try. As it happens, though, the black frit that overflowed from the making of the treble clef symbol I mentioned in my previous blog formed itself up into some passable black "lace" last weekend. It took three re-fillings and re-firings of the treble clef mold before the glass was thick enough to take to the next step, which resulted in three layers of frit overflow around the edges of the fiber paper mold I had cut. (You can see some of that overflow in the picture below.) Without my even trying, I ended up with a couple of really interesting lengths of black frit "lace". (Actually, that was only fair, wasn't it, after all the trouble I'd been having?) I combined the nicer of those bits with some fall colored glass (and some plain white) and fired them yet again to create several new pendants for my shop. They'll be showing up there in the next few days.

I'm really excited to see if this whole experiment ends up being worth the time and the frit! We've been wanting to invest in a new set of dishes for ourselves but just haven't come across a pattern that really excited us. Wouldn't it be sweet if I could just design our own, unique, one-of-a-kind set? Fingers are definitely crossed here....

Pot Melts and Problems

This hasn't been my week for successful glass work. Last weekend, after carefully setting up the kiln for a pot melt, I selected a combination of glass that I thought would melt into something cool, washed each piece to make sure I hadn't left any dust or dirt behind, filled my little terra cotta pot, closed the lid on the kiln, and programmed in the cycle recommended in my glass fusing book. Everything seemed to be going along swimmingly until I checked the melt about mid-way through the hold...For some unknown reason, the pot had tipped over and spilled hot glass all over the kiln shelf around the dish that I had placed for it to melt into. Since this was my first-ever attempt at a pot melt, I still don't understand what happened in there, so I'm not sure how to prevent it happening again, but what can you do? As the cycle finished and the glass cooled, half of it stuck inside the pot rather than flowing out the bottom as intended since the pot was sitting on its side. Then, after the kiln had cooled, I reopened it to find that much of the glass that had spilled out just crumbled when I picked it up for some strange glass-related-chemistry reason. Fortunately, none of the spilled glass stuck to the shelf and nothing was damaged inside the kiln, so it wasn't all bad...and I did get a couple of interesting pieces of spilled and spread glass out of it...so it wasn't a total pot melt loss! I had such high hopes for the real result, though, that I was very disappointed.

Once I recovered from the whole pot melt melt-down, ;-), school started! For three solid days this past week I attended endless staff meetings and inservices as we all returned to work and began to make the transition from summer vacation to classroom. It is always exciting to see everyone again and hear "what they did on their summer vacation"...but reality arrived quickly enough as we gathered up class lists, set up assignments, learned new online grading systems and new office/word processing software, found new classrooms, met new staff, etc., etc., etc. Information overload definitely kicked in and we headed home each day with glazed eyes and tired brains. No mental energy for studio work on those days, that's for sure. Thankfully we have a long weekend to regroup and reenergize before the students arrive on Tuesday and I did manage to get a batch of glass in the kiln on Friday! Interestingly enough, though, my glass woes were not over.

Saturday morning came and I opened the kiln to discover that the square tile that I had put in a plate mold to slump had developed HUGE bubbles! I have never opened the kiln to something like this before, so after the pot melt surprise the weekend before I just couldn't believe it. (The kiln gods must be upset with me about something....) After taking the piece out of the kiln and looking at the mold, I did discover that the air hole on the plate mold was plugged with a thin little film of kiln wash, which I'm going to assume was the culprit. Although it doesn't look salvageable at the moment, I'll let it float around back in the artistic subconscious for a while before abandoning it all together--in hope that a potential repair or rework idea will rise to the surface. With any luck at all it will be back at some point in the future, looking all nice and shiny and beautiful--and I'll probably never forget to check the vent hole ever again, either.

You would think that that would have been enough troubles for one week, wouldn't you? But no, there's more. I had promised someone that I would have a custom piece ready for them on Saturday morning. On Friday, all that was left to do was to glue on an Aanraku bail and set it somewhere safe to dry. No problem, right? I use Devcon's slow-cure epoxy and have never, ever, ever had any sort of problem with it. Until Saturday. I went downstairs to get the pendant and wrap it up...only to discover that the bail was still sliding around on the back of it in a film of non-hardened epoxy slurry. Good grief! So....I got out the fingernail polish remover, cleaned off all of the yuck, mixed new epoxy and started over. Now if I used the quick-cure epoxy it all would have been OK, as that hardens up fairly quickly. Not so the slow-cure. It takes several hours to finalize the curing process (which results in a much stronger bond--a good thing that is worth waiting for as a rule) and meant that the piece was not ready for wearing yesterday morning as planned. Fortunately, the special requestee in this case is an understanding friend, but it is never a good feeling to run in to unexpected inconsistencies in a product you have used successfully for a long time.

It might be reasonable to expect that after a week like this I would just throw up my hands and step away from the studio for a bit. Completely understandable under the circumstances, I think! But, no, call me the eternal optimist...or...muleheaded, whichever you think is more appropriate, but I put another batch of glass in the kiln yesterday. Here's a fiber paper mold that I cut as a special request for a friend who is a musician and wanted to know if I could make her a pendant out of the treble clef symbol. I thought about doing a freeze-n-fuse, but I didn't have any of the supplies and wasn't sure I wanted to spend what it would cost to launch a whole new technique right now, so I opted for a hand-cut mold first just to see if I could make it work before I tried something else. I found a child's coloring page for a pattern, paperclipped the pattern to a 1/4" thick piece of fiber paper and used a craft knife to carefully cut it out. It came out pretty OK, so I had hope for success! After I got that done, I started working on a couple of other small tiles, one for a special request from a family member and one because I had made three kite shapes earlier in the summer that slid a little sideways and weren't quite what I wanted but that were too nice to waste. Here's a shot of the kiln prior to firing:

Wish Me Luck!!

Life...

The breeze coming through my patio door is cool today, the neighborhood quiet, only the gentlest of ripples are rolling across the surface of the lake just down the hill. Overhead, the sky is filled with sculpted gray clouds arranged in undulating rows of light charcoal and pale ash, depending on where the light is most breaking through and where it is most obscured. The entire feel of the moment is still and calm...an envelope of solitude and quiet. .......Interludes such as this are so rare as to be beyond worth. Silence itself becomes a tangible thing that moves through and past your body like light through a pane of window glass, and you exist, for a trice, not as a separate and solid entity, but in concert, as much a part of the silence as motes in a stream of sunlight.

My day job is in the public schools, managing two libraries on two different campuses, which I move between on alternate days. Life in that world can be maddeningly busy...if not physically, then mentally...as I deal with students from the age of kindergarten through the 12th grade and staff of all sizes, shapes, and personalities. I'm also the chairman of our district technology committee and recently took over as president of our local teacher's union. I haven't actively sought out any of these responsibilities other than my teaching position. If anyone had asked me even just a couple of years back whether or not I would end up here, I would have laughed derisively. Not me--I won't be doing that! It's bewildering sometimes where the path leads, the number of mudholes there are along the way, the fleeting flashes of joy and satisfaction when something you've worked on goes well or comes out even better than you could have guessed it would. Mostly, life is just an unending series of challenges to contend with...some extremely complex and fraught with pitfalls...others just the day-to-day stuff of getting on with it.

Today, this instant of quiescent hush and serene quietude, is more rejuvenating for me than a week of frenzied vacationing. It reaches in and smooths out all my rough edges until my entire being resonates with peace and my mind is uncluttered with tasks and duties and incessant voices. Truly a gift of the highest value.

Summer Outings and Challenges

Summer is the time for impromptu day trips with family...spontaneous little outings like a boat trip up through the waters of Voyageurs National Park to the Kettle Falls Hotel. (Check it out on the web...it's a great holdover from the 1940s.) We took such a trip yesterday...made the decision to head out after checking the weather at about 10:30 in the morning, then packed up ourselves, our daughter and her family and took off. After a bit of a drive--about an hour to an hour and a half--we launched the boat in Crane Lake and set out across the water for what we hoped would be a three-hour-or-so tour. :-) It ended up being a bit longer than that, since we had to stop and do a little sight-seeing and fishing on the way out and on the way back, but everything went well...there were no equipment problems, no unexpected squalls, and no need to dub our watercraft with anything similar to the S.S. Minnow of Gilligan's Island fame. The scenery was exquisite, the company was terrific, and the weather cooperated completely. We even managed to catch this picture! I suspect we disturbed this fellow's (or gal's) solitary evening fishing, but the few minutes we spent observing him probably didn't cramp his style too much.

A day spent on the road and on the water sure gave me some things to consider for the Creative Glass Guild's August challenge....using the theme of summer, create a unique piece of glass art that encapsulates the essence of this special season. I have one piece ready to enter if I can just get a good picture, and a bunch of potential ideas that I hope to explore as soon as I have some time in the shop!

Inaugural Blog

I'm considering this my second little toe-dip into the world of online marketing! I launched my first-ever online shop in May via Etsy...(http://www.flowingglass.etsy.com) which has been a good experience so far, btw...and am now taking another step forward by setting up a personal blog for my home business. I don't exactly know where this will take me or whether or not it will end up being a business-booster, but that's the way so many things in life are. You just have to move forward with a little hope and a lot of faith and trust that the rest will fall into place if you're where you're supposed to be.