Dunham's combined the scientific glassblowing world with engineering and art, and come up with steam engines, compressed air engines and "marble machines" that are genuinely cool. Definitely worth a look.
Quick note: Remember Windwoman, the 8x8 glass tile I did for a virtual exhibit? The exhibit, GlassQuilt, is now open, thanks to hard (and great) work from glass artist Toni Johnson.
As much as I like working with larger forms of glass, you just can't beat frit for infinite possibilities...I particularly enjoyed one experiment--packing powder into simple geometric shapes and letting it fuse into glossy pyramids and circles and squares. So, just as fun exercise, I decided to do a whole piece this way, with a few twists.
Every once in awhile I love doing an assigned glass project. It's a good stretch of the creative muscles--they tell you what they want, and you get to figure out how to accomplish it. Good, clean brainfun.
My color dilemma has me making more and more color samples for my glasswork. As I mentioned in my reactivities post, I do color samples in two ways. For regular kilnwork I make shallow clear glass trays with superglue, fill the tray cells with measured frit quantities, and wind up with 6mm color sample charts that are immensely useful when figuring out color-matching and what reacts with which. The set I'm working on now, though, are for pate de verre, and they look at depth and texture as well as color.
So StumpBowl, my first playing around exercise in a long while, is done and I think I have managed to create the vitreous equivalent of the hooked rug. Humpftt. I've learned some valuable lessons, though.
I'm taking a brief hiatus from my pate de verre while I figure out where I'm taking color in casting. Sometimes when I get stuck, playing around with the glass helps me kickstart work in the problem area. So...I'm playing, and I'm trying to concentrate more on texture than color. Hence Stumpbowl.
Sometimes making the obvious easier makes other things much more difficult. These days I'm wondering if letting the glass manufacturer (in this case Bullseye) do all the work is really a good idea. I think the biggest challenge of working with kilnformed glass is that you often take the final appearance of your work on faith, since the glass may change radically between its cold assembly and the final firing.
When I hit my 20s in California, we knew that you were what you drove. The first question out of a girl's mouth was liable to be "where's your car?" when interviewing prospective dates. Given California's non-existent dress code it was the most reliable indicator we had. Old Beemers and Volvo station wagons were driven by eccentrics who might be serial killers or elementary school teachers, yuppies drove new Beemers, doctors drove Mercedes, guys who were cheating on their wives drove convertibles, and old fogeys drove Cadillacs.
The state of New Hampshire just went to court to defend one of the first laws prohibiting the use of prescription-writing data to market drugs to doctors. The plaintiffs, healthcare market research companies, argue that the law is a First Amendment violation. (Given New Hampshire's fierce love of freedom, that's gotta hurt.) But it's an interesting and potentially landmark case [...]
