"Would you like to sit here?" a quavering voice asked. I'd planned to grab a fast breakfast while I waited for the paint store next door to open, but the clog-your-arteries breakfast place was jammed to the gills. A grey-haired lady gestured to the empty seat beside her, inviting me to sit down. I accepted eagerly and joined her and her daughter, a plump woman in her 20s. And that was how I hired the singing housepainter.
Guess what I've been doing in my spare time? Everybody needs a goal, right? I decided mine was to make 600 glass cabochons for a project I have at the end of April. So for the last three or four weeks I've been chopping, shaping, grinding and firing dozens and dozens of those kilnformed murrini I've been writing about. And it's kinda like peanuts: I examine a fresh-from-the-kiln batch, wonder what would happen if I sawed the cane THIS way, or fired an extra 30 minutes, or stacked the glass THAT way...and off I go to try that.
"You need to invent," she said, "a mythology." "A who?" "A mythology. For your pendants," and she tapped one authoritatively, "You need to involve your customers in the story behind these faces." "Ahhhhhh, you want the backstory," I said, "Sure. See, I always seem to put faces in everything I sculpt, no matter what..." "No," she said impatiently, "MYTH-OL-O-GY. What [...]
There are days I think my life is one big detour...and that's exactly the way I want it. I've
"Wanna buy some cookies?" She's standing with her mom at the entrance to the grocery store, snugly bundled against the rain, reminding me that it's Girl Scout cookie season. Stacks and stacks of cookie boxes weigh down her table and an artfully handmade sign--COOKEZ 4 SAIL!--proclaims that she's open for business. I gulp and stiffen the ol' backbone. I don't need ANY cookies, not even those peanut-buttery ones, or the sweetly tangy lemon--STOP IT CYNTHIA! Besides, my neighborhood scout-lettes will eagerly sell me a box or dozen. Buying cookies from the neighborhood is a given where I live; I'd probably have to sneak strangers' cookies in under cover of darkness.
Last weekend the antmind temporarily took over my master bathroom. Thanks to perseverance and enough bugspray to float a battleship, I retook the disputed territory about fifteen minutes after they planted the flag. Yet spring is coming; this is only round 1. I'm thinking about tenting the house and letting off the formicidean equivalent of a nuclear warhead inside. Take [...]
When does a cane stop being murrini cane and start being pattern bar? Beats me. I can find only two differences. In fact, for many types of murrine you start with a huge pattern bar, then heat and stretch and compress it until it becomes...murrini cane. So... if I use the same techniques I use to make pattern bars, then experiment with ways to stretch and distort those bars in the kiln, and then cut "cane" bars from the resulting stack...I should have murrini, right?
I promised I'd show you what my two Fusing 101 students made in their first class, so here 'tis. Shelby made what's essentially a color map of her favorite place in Monet's beloved Giverny:
Saturday. A dragon's flying over the cash register and out in the parking lot the drivers are totally bloody nuts. Must be Uwajimaya. Uwajimaya is the local Japanese grocery chain, but it's more like an Asian Costco; inside, there's a bookstore, homewares, appliances, all sorts of things. I'm on a mission, seeking handmade Japanese papers for various projects, a few assorted goodies from the produce aisles, and one of Miyazaki's non-English animes. Cherrybaby and I pull into the parking lot, narrowly avoiding a homicidal septuagenarian bent on achieving a prime parking space.
"I've been dreaming about this at night," Shelby told me excitedly, as we tripped down the stairs to my studio, "This is gonna be soooo coool!" Right then, the joy part of making glass hit me--whap--right in the head. If you want to renew your own sense of joy and discovery in art (or probably anything else), just teach someone else to love it, too.
