Apologies for the lack of posts lately; working silly-long hours at my day job at the moment (never have multiple clients in a crisis simultaneously) and also determined to stick to my "at least 20 hours/week" on my glass work. At the moment I'm rediscovering my INability to add another six hours to the day, and thinking that sleep is [...]
Whew. Been so busy my eyes are crossing (which makes it kinda hard to write), but did want to mention what I'm up to this week: Alicia Lomne's pate de verre class at Bullseye. I am having a ball, and sorry that the week's drawing to a close. Most people employ pate de verre techniques (there are many) to create [...]
The kiln hit process temp* last night, stayed that way for eight hours and about two minutes ago reached its annealing soak. It'll soak for another 23 hours and 58 minutes, then start the long, downhill slide to room temperature. By my calculations it'll hit room temperature Friday morning at 5:15 AM. Another 24 hours of resting, and it's mine. [...]
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.)
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.
