I'm thinking of this now because somebody asked me what I'd recommend to stock a new studio with an adequate supply of frit. My first impulse was to suggest that such a question was rather like asking which letters to buy for your laptop keyboard. Then I got to thinking about it, and it really is a good question. Not sure it has an answer, but it's still a good question.
A very prominent glass sculptor once told me she's noticed that as she gets older her glass sculptures are getting smaller and smaller. "By the time I'm 65 I'll be down to making pendants," she snorted.
If you read yesterday's post you probably got that I'm not exactly the world's biggest fan of sculpting wax. I am a huge fan, though, of sculpting in clay. That's why I've spent many hours figuring out how to cast my glass sculptures without a sticky, crud-colored drop of victory brown wax in the house. It worked. Mostly. Which is probably why I was visited by the wax missionaries.
So I have this thing about wax. Love it for candles and jam jars and letters. Hate it for sculpting. This is odd, since I sculpt. (And lately, I sculpt a lot.)
So with a humungous glass sculpture inside, my little Skutt GM1414 decides to pull a fast one. Or rather a slow one...
Quick note: Remember Windwoman, the 8x8 glass tile I did for a virtual exhibit? The exhibit, GlassQuilt, is now open, thanks to hard (and great) work from glass artist Toni Johnson.
Every once in awhile I love doing an assigned glass project. It's a good stretch of the creative muscles--they tell you what they want, and you get to figure out how to accomplish it. Good, clean brainfun.
My color dilemma has me making more and more color samples for my glasswork. As I mentioned in my reactivities post, I do color samples in two ways. For regular kilnwork I make shallow clear glass trays with superglue, fill the tray cells with measured frit quantities, and wind up with 6mm color sample charts that are immensely useful when figuring out color-matching and what reacts with which. The set I'm working on now, though, are for pate de verre, and they look at depth and texture as well as color.
Sometimes making the obvious easier makes other things much more difficult. These days I'm wondering if letting the glass manufacturer (in this case Bullseye) do all the work is really a good idea. I think the biggest challenge of working with kilnformed glass is that you often take the final appearance of your work on faith, since the glass may change radically between its cold assembly and the final firing.
Apparently the way you get rubber cement is by dissolving rubber in a solvent. Paint this concoction on something, and you get a permanently sticky bond with...whatever. (Want details? Check out the e-Encyclopedia entry.) This is relevant because the logical extension of having a solvent in rubber cement somehow escaped me. I wanted to layer things onto an organically curved, [...]
