Catastrophe

<sigh> What a week it has been. Just and all round booger of a week.

I finally finished the Gabriel’s Trumpets piece, which I have been calling “hummers”, because it is so much easier.

I patina’d the flowers copper, and the rest of the piece black. I had a little problem with impurities leaking out of my solder. The solder is old, and discolored, and I cleaned it before I used it, but not well enough. Even after the patina was on, I had some mold bleed through. What to do, what to do? I went through one of my teaching books, and found the solution for polishing patina. Plain old liquid car wax.

It does take the black off a tad, leaving the metal more charcoal, with a hint of brown. And it gets super shiny, so you need to  like that look. The book said to use red jewelers rouge for the copper patina, but I couldn’t find any of that, so I just used the Zymol polish, and it seems to have worked very well. The best part? It polishes off all the mold spots that has leaked out.

I took it to work, to put in the door. The pattern had shifted a bit when I was doing it, so the size was just a 1/16′ too big, along one side. BOOOOO! I was going to need to bring a sanding block in and sand one side of the window down to allow it to fit. Fine, dang it!

I leaned the piece up against my desk.

Hours later, I was working on one client and my next client came in. She didn’t want to infringe on the current clients time (i think), so she asked if she could sit at my desk. I said sure. When it was her turn for services, she stood up and did something (don’t know what, my back was turned) and I heard Whump!!! What the hell was that? and turned around and there was the hummer piece, laying flat on the floor.

For a second I actually thought that it hadn’t broken. That proved to be a false hope, of course… you blame a girl for hoping. My client was beside herself, blaming herself and apologizing. While a little tiny bit of blame goes to her, the vast majority of it goes to me, for placing the piece in such a vulnerable position.

There they are, the cracks. the two dark, thin lines going from the tips of the hummers wings, are not cracks. I was trying to figure out how to salvage some of the glass, but after playing with it a tad, I don’t think I can. All the large pieces will have to be replaced. What a pain in the ass. The hummers are going to be dangling free while I try to do this. I am still mulling the process over in my mind. I am having trouble getting over the fact that it will probably take me another 20 hours of work to fix it. Stupid, stupid me.

I am going to move on to the christmas orders. Get those done. Then there is Renee’s Ganesha, though there is no deadline for that. I might want to do a little something, something after the christmas projects. Oh, I have that cabinet door to repair, too. Humph. This is starting to look a lot like work…

On we go though, moving forward. I will try to learn something from this. Take better care of the piece!!! Hopefully, I will not have another instance like this. Though honestly, over the course of years, there are bound to be some screw-ups and breakage. Time to hit the shower and get ready for work. Have a great day everyone!

 

Gabriel’s Trumpets with Hummingbirds

On to the next project. Red Bluff is having an Art Walk in November, and I am trying to get a couple of large pieces done by then. A couple friends who own and work at a neighboring day spa have offered to hang some pieces in the spa, during the Art Walk. They have some lovely windows, which I lack in my space, so I am going to take them up on it.

This is the next piece:

Doesn’t look like much at this point, but it will be rockin’ when I am done. I am using a pattern out of a book called Stained Glass Classroom. The original pattern doesn’t have the hummingbirds in it, I added them in. I plan on putting this in the window of my front door at The Spa Downstairs. It’s a big window 24×32. The pattern was originally intended as a decoration inside a home, an accent for a doorway from, say, the dining room to the living room. For the purposes of my front door, I didn’t want to have this gigantic piece of glass at the bottom, so decided to break it up. Hummingbirds have lots of little pieces, grrr!

I am currently in love with the mottled glass I am using for the flowers. A gorgeous white/orange/yellow with some rings. I used it recently in a lotus piece and was so delighted with it, I changed from cranberry to the mottled for the flowers. And honestly, the cranberry glass I have isn’t deep enough in color. I envisioned a deep cranberry, bordering on fuschia, but the cranberry I have is watered down, and the color isn’t consisent, either, it wavers. No good.

I made some other changes to the pattern. The original has a really terrible butterfly hidden in one corner, so out that went. I filled that in with leaves. I also added some umph to s couple of the flowers, at the bottoms. They were a tad puny, and with all the green, they were a bit overwhelmed. Now all the flowers are in full bloom, with exhuberant curling petals. Can’t wait to see it done.

Sometimes I wish I hadn’t sold the kiln. It would be super cool, I think, to put the pieces all together and fire them, fuse them together. Don’t know if you can actually do that, or if it would hold together, but in my mind it works great!

I’ll post more as I go along. Thanks for reading.

Did it!

It was a pain, as I foresaw, but not too bad. Most of the problem was because I didn’t wait long enough after gluing the pattern down. The glue hadn’t dried completely, so when I cut it, it was flooded with water from the saw, and the patterns loosened. The Taurus Ring Saw is fantastic, but it is very wet, and very chip-y. My hands are completely covered in glass bits and chips, and soaking wet, when I finish. The glass bits area problem, all over my hands. You can’t just brush them off, they need to be rinsed of. For that, I have to go into the house. I grabbed the doorknob, and had several pieces of glass insert themselves into my skin. Not fun. I bleed for my art!!

I experimented with gloves when I did the turtle head. The tight ones. Worked out much better than I anticipated. I had thought that they would get all sliced up, but they didn’t. So that I great.

One drawback with the ring saw is this. If you paste the pattern on, and then just cut it out with the saw, you loose a bit more glass than is ideal. I like my pieces nice and tight after I cut them, with just enough of a gap for the foil. I know that it is overly particular of me, but what can I say? I’m particular. You can see in the photo above how there is quite a bit of space between the pieces. When I did the shell, I just pasted the entire pattern to the glass and then used the saw to cut out the individual pieces. I ended up with a 1/4″ gap in the whole shell, when it was all said and done. Totally unacceptable. I was hoping to save a bit of time by using that method, but no dice.

With the turtle head, I clumped a few pieces together, strategically, and then cut them out. I will use foil overlays to mimic a solder line. That is what the black lines are on the pieces.

I did the same thing on the larger flippers, to very good effect.

Wow. That came out big. Oops. The only drawback of this method is that I am too lazy to do the backside, so the piece ends up being one-sided. With this turtle, it isn’t as much of an issue because the shell pattern looks like hell ont he back, so it really should be viewed from only the one side.

Ok, that’s it for tonight folks. Have a great one!

What was I thinking?

I am dreading this. Absolutely frakking dreading it. I do not know what I was thinking…

Well, yes I do. I was thinking of how pretty the shell was going to look… not what a nightmare it was going to be to cut and grind all the itsy-bitsy, tiny pieces for the head. Gah!

I contemplated doing an overlay. But I think the chances of one of the little bits tearing is too high. When I did the butterfly overlay, there were large areas of the copper foil intact. With this piece, it would be more like a spider-web, just the outline. Maybe I’ll clump some of the pieces together and do single line overlays… that’s not a bad idea.

Wish me luck!

It has been a while.

It has been a long long time since I have posted here. Lots of things going on, which do not involve glass, but involve my life, so haven’t been putting much time into the glass. Plus, the workshop is in the garage which, in Redding during July is about 4000 degrees. So. Not so much fun when you drip sweat continuously, and almost pass out…

BUT… I have a new semi-commission, so I am motivated. A friend asked if I would put my glass up in her massage room during ArtWalk. She just moved into a new room, with big windows that look out onto a gorgeous backyard, and down a long sloping hill (on which we rolled one night, like children, after 4 glasses of wine). It ends at the Sacramento River. So the setting is beautiful. And, of course, I was totally flattered to be asked. The ArtWalk is a couple months away, so I have some time to get busy, as they say.

She chose a turtle pattern. I have been wanting an excuse to do a turtle since I went to Hawaii. I had an idea to do one as a thank you present for the couple who let me stay at their house while I was in Hawaii. But, unfortunately, they are a couple no more, and are no longer on Hawaii. So that idea went out the window.

The funnest, and hardest, part is choosing the glass. Normally, I try to stick as close to reality as possible. With this turtle though, I am making a bit of a departure. Most turtle pieces that I have seen, show the shell in shades of brown. Boring. I had this gorgeous teal/green mottled glass that I have decided will be perfect for the shell.

Gorgeous, discontinued, green mottled

close-up of part I will use for shell

All the photos that I looked at online, at least the ones of Hawaiian green turtles, show a dark shell, dark pebbled bits on the flippers and head, with light brownish neck. The undersides of the turtles are startlingly pale, a pale cream, with almost no spots. Not dealing with the underside with this piece, but I love the contrast of the top and bottom. I decided to mix in some of the teal on the head and flippers, with a brown/yellow streaky for the rest. It’s a crap-shoot, design-wise, but I think it will work out well.

What might not work out so well is the cutting. I swore that I wouldn’t do a bunch of small pieces ever again. Turns out, I lied.

what the hell was I thinking?

You can’t really get around it. The turtles head is covered with all these knobby bits. I could cheat, and just do a single piece but, well, that would be cheating, and I don’t like to do that except on my taxes. (PEE-YOU! skunk is hanging out in the backyard right now. guess that answers the question of what has been russelling around outside at night. hadn’t smelled it until tonight.) I had also considered doing an overlay, like I did with the butterfly, but discarded that idea because the lines are so thin. It would be like trying to cutout and attach a spiders web… I think I would end up tearing it.

Soooooo. The ring saw will be getting work out on this one. I think I will cut them out in larger groupings and then do single strand overlays. That’s the current plan, anyway. I reserve the right to change it at any time =)

One last thing. I am using two colors of blue for the water, a dark and a light, with some ribbons of clear bubbled glass, just for fun. My choices of light blue were limited. I have this one long, narrow strip of med blue that looked very well with the dark blue glass that I had chosen. But it is a pretty small amount of glass. I farted around with it a bit, and made it work, HA!

That’s a damn good use of glass, if I may say so myself. This particular glass is a b-i-t-c-h to cut, so the saw will come in handy on this one also. I used this glass in Ganesha, and had just a hell of a time getting it to break along the score lines. In my experience, this type of glass, with a translucent color mixed with an opaque white swirl is just a friggin’ nightmare. It looks pretty, sure. Scoring, breaking… not so fun. And the surface is jacked up too, like lava as it cools, all lumpy and bumpy. 

That’s it for now, kids. More as I go through it.

I did not fall off the end of the Earth

Wow! It’s been a month since I posted here. Sorry. It isn’t that I haven’t been working glass, but rather that time is passing by more swiftly.

I finished two of the pieces I had set up, for Etsy: Dragonflies in Grass, and Lotus.

 

 

Dragonflies in Grass

 

Lotus

I am very happy with both pieces. And someone out there was happy with Lotus, because it sold. Yippee!!! I haven’t made the butterfly and flower piece yet, and probably won’t for a few weeks. I want to do a couple more lotus pieces, and see what happens with them. I went tame on the colors for the original, a frosty white for the blossom and a gorgeous sapphire blue for the background, but now I want to get a little crazy and see what happens. I have a gorgeous speckle glass that i bought from John at Glass Addict when he was closing, full of fiery reds and yellows and oranges, set in an opaque white. I want to try that for the back ground. The trick, of course, is to ensure that the background doesn’t over whelm the blossom, so I need to play with that some more. I would love to use a bold red for the blossom, but don’t know if that will go over well. i’ll lay everything out on the light table and see how it looks.

I was culling trough some of the many many pattern books that I have, trying to thin out the bulk. Not really into the cutsey suncatchers… the bunnies and birds and vegetables. While I was looking, I found a nice simple tulip window, half-fan, that has great lines. It looks like a classic piece from the nineteenth century, and caught my interest, so I have been working on that. Initially I thought I would put it up for sale, but my mom is in raptures over it, so maybe it will go to her for a belated mom’s day gift. Since I wasn’t even in town for that, nor did I get her a present or card. I did give her a hug and tell her that I loved her before I left =) She seemed very pleased with that.

Ok, off to the couch. I am in the mood for a movie. Hoping to catch some Star Trek and Terminator at the big screen this weekend. After I do some serious yard work, that is. My yard is the second-worst looking yard on the block. That’s pretty bad…

Aaaahhhh… published!

A year or so ago, I sent in a photo of Ganesha to Delphi Glass’s annual contest. Didn’t even get an honorable mention. Looking at the efforts that won awards, or at least recognition is the honorable mention category, I decided that awards were for insecure people looking for fame… or some such shit designed to assuage the crushing loss I felt over not being chosen.

I kind of soured on “award” things for a while. (Honestly though, now that I look back at the winner, the stained glass winners are pretty fabulous. The mosaic winners are beyond belief.)

On a whim, I sent in a photo of Ganesha to another publication, Stained Glass News. And promptly forgot about it.

Stained Glass News is a very cool little paper, free from your local glass retailer. There are all kinds of helpful hints in it, interesting advertisements, and lots and lots of advice from experts. Most of the newsletter is interactive in that people write in questions and experts answer them in the newsletter. Anther thing I like is that each month they picture someone’s home workshop. I have gotten some great ideas from those photos.

A week ago I received an email saying that they needed my mailing address, they were putting my picture in an issue and wanted to mail me a couple copies.

So…abso*frakkin*lutely… cool!!!

 

cover...

 

... ta-DA!!! there I am, #6.

They even spelled my name correctly!!  Total bragging rights, very very excited.

Some gratification

After posting my Buddha & Lotus piece on Etsy, I had an invitation to be featured on a very cool Blog. The blog\’s writer Wendy Baylis searches the web for cool art, and she liked mine. I checked out her blog (www.dharmadesigns.blogspot.com) and was blown away by the art and artists she posts on it. 

I accepted her generous offer immediately.

I am immensely flattered to be sharing the blog with artists like DrBenWu, who does fantastic, detailed Japanese art, in a black and white relief style; CanesGalactica, who does gorgeous, vivid watercolor art; Kozue, who does hand-crafted stamps (I bought the featured Buddha head, had to have it): tashdesigns, beautiful artwork in an ancient style; NamasteSilks, Hand-painted silk items (love the tie!), and : paisleybleu, whose sushi-themed bib is just the cutest thing ever.

I haven\’t had a chance to check out older posts, but it seems to be a treasure trove over Buddha/Asian themed art. Much easier than trolling etsy if you are looking for these specific themes. Great stuff!

The creative juices are flowing

Now that my last commission piece is officially handed over, and my worktable is cleaned up, I can move on to the next project. I finally listed a piece on Etsy. I only have the one piece, so I want to get some more up there. Figuring out the shipping costs is the hardest part. I need to figure out a better way to photograph these things too. Jake had sent me a article on how to biuld the ideal box for photographing jewelry, or small art objects… but I can’t find it!

Anyway. I thought about doing some small pieces, like suncatchers, but I need to come up with a better name than that. The usual suspects; butterflies, dragonflies, lotus blossoms, maybe a partial buddah head, some flowers. I had envisioned some really simple things, so I could make them fast, put them up.

I sat down after a nap, and did some sketching. Looked through some books for inspiration. Then I scanned the images in as blanks to work from, printed out a couple pages, and sketched some more. Pretty please with the results.

 

lotus suncatcher

Nice and simple. I had the idea that if I could get a selection of images, that these could be hung in a three panel, one above the other, suspended on thing chains, with maybe little bits of beads dangling from the bottom corners.

 

Gerber daisy and Peacock Butterfly

 This one turned out a bit busy, but I will handle that during color selection. The flower will be pale, and the butterfly done in jewel tones, so it really pops. I like this one very much.

 

Dragonflies and grass

 Love the way this one turned out. Initially I wanted it to be small, and tight, but with the grass, you cant really have that, or it is just a bunch of lines. i think I will use some of my carefully hoarded confetti and streamers glass for the background on this.

So I am going to be starting on these pieces this week. Nothing really to use the saw on, though maybe I will, just to get some practice. Off to my day job now!