currentsbirth-tuliplady

I haven’t normally shown heartwork, just glasswork, in this blog, but since this is Job #1 in my thoughts right now…

tuliplady1.jpgI finally cooked my biggest Emergent to date, the tulip lady (AKA Emerging 1), and decided to go for color instead of the all-cream palette I’d just about decided on.

Kiln had cooled down, so I opened it to peek, and got the expected Christmas and train wreck moments, all rolled into one.

First the train wreck: The R&R910 didn’t hold. Not sure why–because I babied that bloody mold and made it thicker than it needed to be–but the mold split at the left-hand third, near the top, and flashed to about 2/3 down the panel.

Since I’ve had the mold sitting in my studio for several months, I suspect I at some point bumped it and caused a small crack.
tulipladycrack.jpg
At the top, though, 3-4 pounds of crystal headed south, through the crack (dammit). I did not, thankfully, wind up with a glass kiln floor (thank you, kilnwash gods), but I do have one of the most expensive pot melts around.
tulipladypotmelt.jpg
–sigh– As a result, the piece is thinner at the top than I wanted. And the lady is sporting a big honking fin over an eyebrow, one that heads down toward the center of the piece.
tulipladyflashing.jpg
But now for Christmas: The flow of glass took care of my one worry when charging the mold: That no matter how flowing my application, I wouldn’t get the wispy, organic shading I was after.

Thanks to the hole in the mold, I got all the flow of color I could want, and it did a kind of potmelt thing within the work itself that’s going to clean up VERY nicely. I think. For the most part, the glass flow direction follows the movement of the piece.

Did we get flow? Yeah, babe. We got FLOW.

Also, the surface is well-nigh flawless. Yum.


This needs a touch of edge smoothing at the back, nothing major, and that stupid flash taken off, but otherwise I couldn’t ask for a better surface. R&R910 isn’t supposed to need kilnwash, but if this is the quality of surface I get from doing that, I’m sold. (Thank you, Bullseye)

Apologies for the crummy pictures–she’s a little more stunning in person.

Anyway, I’ll take the flashing off the lady’s eyebrow, finish getting the plaster off, and figure out how to mount this thing on a wall. Then there’s photography, which might get tricky… but overall, I’m a happy camper. And I got FLOW…. 😉

P.S. Got the flashing off this weekend, unruffled the lady’s feathers a bit. Now she’s ready for a light sandblasting and some acid polishing.