Whether you celebrate the Christian/pagan day or not, best wishes for a festive holiday season, and much hope and joy for the last 5 days of the year and the 365 to follow. Here's what should be the last of my fractured carols for 2010: The 12 days of Glassmass On the first day of Glassmass my true love gave [...]
My first trip to the White House as a reporter was not exactly an unqualified success. For one thing, I hadn't been in Washington DC long enough to really acquire the jaded affect of the rest of the DC press corps and I stuck out like a sore thumb. For another, I wasn't exactly in the DC press corps--I was a PC reviewer for a newspaper about public sector computing, Government Computer News. My interest in the White House was usually limited to presidential use of Macs and PCs. Clinton and Monica Lewinsky would never appear on my radar...unless Clinton used an optical mouse instead of a cigar.
Had lunch with a friend this week, and found out she grew up on a farm in eastern Oregon, ran a combine, etc. We had a lot of fun comparing experiences--I didn't grow up on a farm, far from it, but I grew up in Fresno, California, the agricultural center of the universe. And Fresno's where I learned one crucial ag rule: Never try to kill a steer with your eyes closed.
A ring mottle is not some wierd kind of pigeon. It's a type of patterned colored glass used by some of the best-known stained glass artisans in history, i.e., Tiffany, LaFarge, etc. (I believe Tiffany's studio invented ring mottle, but don't quote me.) The ring mottles are gorgeous when you see them in person but I don't think they photograph [...]
Held an informal workshop in my studio a few weeks ago--enjoyed it very much and my "students" appeared to get a kick out of it as well--and Mom suggested that she would like to do some glasswork, too. She's a terrific ceramic artist; some of the pieces she's thrown for my birthday/Christmas gifts are among the favorites in my collection. Ceramic artists have a pretty ingrained understanding of the effects of heatwork, and we've often discussed the differences between ceramics and glass in that respect, so I figured she'd take to it. She did, like a duck to water.
Note to all who call a spade an individualized excavatory device: Stop it. Of course, if they really stopped, I’d be on welfare. Finding the right words has paid the mortgage for many years. Still, there are times I wish that people wouldn't assume that originality and confusing the hell out of the customer are the same thing. I mention [...]
Do you ever wish there were some kind of absolute truth machine? One where you feed the words into the hopper at one end and at the other end a bell dings and a screen pops up saying "Yup, it's true," or "Absolute, total BS. Ignore it." I sure do. It would save so much time. When I was in [...]
It’s Halloween and we all have our ghost stories to tell, right? Here’s mine. A long time ago, I managed networks and BBSes (a kind of early online community) for a research group in our local agricultural college. Our charter was to persuade farmers, agriculture teachers and the ag industry in general to use the computer to gain competitive advantage over the rest of the world.
One problem with being addicted to creating glass art is that it's not exactly a compact hobby. Coldworking equipment (grinders, laps, rociprolaps, saws, etc) take up considerable space and create a lot of mess, kilns also require some space, and you need somewhere to store extra sheet and frit glass, molds, mold-making materials and supplies, kiln furniture, tubs of abrasive [...]
Took a casting class and in the course of it one of the other students, a gifted metal and jewelry-maker named Carla Fox, started experimenting with tinted frits. When I saw the results I was hooked. Frit tinting is essentially mixing small amounts of deeply colored glass powder (normally opal, i.e., opaque, glass) with crushed clear or neutral-colored base glass. [...]
