Hey, glasslanders: Just a quick reminder that Fusathon 2012 is TOMORROW! Clear your Saturday because this is going to be FUN! Yup. That's Saturday, 10-2, at the Uroboros glass factory. We'll be making fused blanks for bowls/plates that will be sold at the Portland Blues Festival over the July 4th holiday. All proceeds go to the Oregon Food Bank.
To all artists who make (at least part of) a living doing artfairs: Superpeople. You're superpeople. Your muscles are titanium, your brains are solid gold. I am not in your class. After one artfair, my muscles are jelly, and my brain is solid mush.
I opened the bedroom door yesterday morning and Lola strolled in, purring ecstatically, wearing my underpants on her head. (Yes, I took pictures and no, you can't see them) I made a mental note to ALSO lock up the dirty laundry basket.
"My wife's Vietnamese, but I love her anyway," he said, so seriously that I couldn't tell if he was joking. The old guy had jogged up to my new house in gymshorts, Nikes and a tank top, skinny as a rail with a shock of white hair that flew anywhere but down. I'd seen him before. "Let me be the first to welcome you to our neighborhood!" he bellowed, so loud that the movers stopped to watch. He said he was an ex-Navy officer--I think an admiral but (as my military relatives will confirm) I can't distinguish admirals from airmen so who knows? He'd retired into a couple of successful businesses, and he and his wife had been two of the original settlers in the neighborhood. He was friendly...but the Vietnamese crack bothered me, even when I saw the twinkle in his eye.
One nice thing about a glass art blog is that it's read by...(drumroll) ...artists. Especially artists who sell their work at artfairs and such. And that's just who I want to talk to now. If you've designed a good booth for selling arts and crafts: I need your advice. Please?
Q: Is there a better (faster, cheaper) way to coldwork small glass sculptures? A: Yep A BeCon or two ago, Richard Whiteley, head of the Canberra glass school, said that glasswork fresh from the kiln was only half finished; coldwork was necessary to take it the rest of the way. Ouch. I happen to agree with him, but as much as I love HAVING coldworked, I hate DOING coldwork and seem to be on a neverending quest to avoid it. Right now I'm testing a bunch of machines to see if they can automate the finishing process for small cast glass sculptures, like pendants.
It's all in the way you slice it. And the way you slice it is, apparently, profoundly affected by a good blade. Check any glassmaker's forum and you'll probably find someone with glass cutting issues, usually stemming from a tile saw that's more like a Cuisinart than a slicer. I don't claim any special expertise at this stuff, but I do have a decades-old, cheap, badly made, out-of-true tilesaw that reliably cuts amazingly thin murrini cane* slices. I do this a lot. So I must be doing something right...right?
OK, I'm beginning to look like a doting mamma with home videos, but...I kept finding towels on the floor in the guest bath. Wasn't difficult to figure out who was doing it--not with The Princess Lola and Nikki the Tikkimaus around--but all the other towel racks in the house were safe from their depredations. So I hung the towel back on the rack, grabbed Izzy the 'Pad (that iMovie feature is really killer), and settled into the bathtub to wait. It didn't take long:
Strolling the Pearl (a favorite occupation I hardly ever get to do these days), I spied a big cast glass sculpture in the window and stopped in to see who made it. "He's from Israel, really talented artist," said the clerk. "Ahh...and that one?" I pointed to a big blown dinosaur-like piece, reminiscent of Tagliapietra. "Celotto, from Italy." Hmmm. "How about that one?" and I indicated a series of flat, fused (ooops, sorry, Lani) kilnformed panels on the usual powder-coated steel stands. Swedish.
Savannah kittens make wonderful housemates...if you stay two steps ahead of their inventive little minds. Give them enough "legal" stuff to do, the theory goes, and they won't edit your art collection (i.e., break stuff). I gave them a "highly difficult" puzzle, guaranteed to keep dogs occupied for weeks, with small wooden cups that move along a track. The animal is supposed to slide the cups until they can be upended, to reveal treat. The kittens liberated all the treats in about 15 minutes and then, bored, headed for the bathroom to play toilet bowl jacuzzi (they LIKE water). So I made them a cat gym.
