Just finished taking this class from Australian glass artist Kirstie Rea, had some very interesting exercises that made me think. Wasn't really taking it for the coldworking opportunities--which were legion--but greatly enjoyed the opportunity to share space with some good glass artists.
I am most emphatically NOT a birdwatcher. I don’t even own a pair of those khaki safari shorts or a pith helmet. I can point out robins and bluejays and hummingbirds, but get beyond that and all I can say is “it has feathers. must be a bird.” So when I heard a loud clacking behind me this morning, as [...]
I work with some noxious substances--it's just what you do when you cast glass--and I take every precaution to (a) not incorporate the stuff into my body (b) not wind up wearing it and ruining yet another outfit, and (c) not get it all over everything so I don't have to spend hours getting it off the kitchen counter or [...]
September 11 changed my life in more ways than I thought possible–I have a hard time believing it’s been so long ago. […]
It’s a gorgeous day here in glassland, rained just enough yesterday to turn the car into a mud-spattered mess, and I stopped off at the carwash on the way home. Only about 500 people had the same idea, and while I waited patiently in line I spotted two teenage girls poking fun at a dumpy middle-aged lady. She was chubby, [...]
In a previous note I looked back at many (alas, not all, due to some server losses) of the designs I've made for Morganica.com over the years. At the end I'd said we'll see how this evolves as the new design settles into its paces. There's a point at which you stop testing and simply float the bloody thing (which [...]
My sister’s family bought a few acres on a mountain in southern Washington state, about 90 minutes from Portland. Their dream house–built largely by my brother-in-law–is currently under construction. Suzi started designing the house at least four years ago, and somewhere along the way decided that *her* idea of a dream house was a place called Nether Lypiatt. A classical [...]
Apparently the way you get rubber cement is by dissolving rubber in a solvent. Paint this concoction on something, and you get a permanently sticky bond with...whatever. (Want details? Check out the e-Encyclopedia entry.) This is relevant because the logical extension of having a solvent in rubber cement somehow escaped me. I wanted to layer things onto an organically curved, [...]
This morning I looked out the window to the house that's catty-corner from mine, and thought about Yuri and the Chagall. Yuri, a balding, bouncy man in his late 50s, used to own that house. He greeted me enthusiastically when I moved in, told me his family was from the Ukraine, that he was a painter and that the gorgeous [...]
Katie, the girl who lives across the street, has a strict mother and a boyfriend. Neither would be a problem if the boyfriend had more brains than a radish. At best, hormones are interfering with his higher brain function, which has made for an entertaining summer. There’s only been a moderate amount of tonsil exploration in the front yard–the boyfriend [...]
