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. [...]
Headed out to drop off my ballot (yeah, yeah, I'm late) and buy some baby food (don't ask), stopped at the red light and glanced at the van waiting in front of me. Its rear view mirror was moving. Huh? Looked again, and it wasn't a rear-view mirror, it was a video screen. There was some sort of children's video [...]
Doing a little market research for someone right now. Nothing fancy, just an informal Zoomerang survey: 10 questions sent out to about 3,000 customers, offering them a chance at a free lunch if they respond. Sent the questionnaire to the veep and the head of customer service for approval, and got an immediate grumble: Why were we wasting five of [...]
OK, so the title of this blogpost is a double entendre--either I slipped on a squashed pumpkin and landed on the mouse, or I've been wildly celebrating Halloween for a whole week. I'll leave you to decide which. Usually I tell a scary story on All Hallows Eve (last year was the tale of the dead chicken ghosts). This year, [...]
Didn't know whether to file this under glasswork or gadgetry, so I'm opting for both. The Glass Orchestra, in Toronto, plays exclusively on glass instruments, most of which the members design and fabricate themselves. Think of it as musical water glasses, on steroids. They've got some MP3s on the site you can listen to, sound a bit like a cross [...]
Pulled another batch of five-finger experiments out of the kiln this morning, couple of conventional tack-fuse pieces that came out well and will go into sales inventory, and two experiments that failed-but. Neither was a success. The one at right, kind of a fast-de-verre, I adore but it developed a crack around the base, undoubtedly due to expansion differentials of [...]
If you've read the previous post, you read that I got a couple of nice experiments out of the kiln tonight. The first is a fibrous-looking, almost woven basket (which actually does have some weaving processes) out of stringer. The second, the subject of this post, uses small pieces of sheet glass instead of stringers and noodles. I'm calling it [...]
Forgot to mention, also pulled this one out of the kiln last night: […]
I opened the kiln to some seriously cool pieces tonight. They may get beyond the level of five-finger exercise and into "worth exploring." Played around with the stringer-on-a-support-structure thing a couple of weeks ago, and built a small blue basket to test the concept. I liked the way it turned out: I decided to explore this a bit, continuing with [...]
Just got back from the Oregon Glass Guild's field trip to Seattle; had a lovely time, very nice people. Special thanks to Robin Knoke for organizing the trip, which was amazingly inexpensive and very informative. OGG chartered a bus to drive us all up to visit the Spectrum glass factory, stop in at Olympic Color Rods (which supplies a fair [...]
