Life Changing Experience

I will write more about this later once it all congeals in my mind. Here is my recent post to FB and G+:

Last week's intensive glass class is proving to have been a crucible, figuratively and literally, for me. I see my life in more focus than I ever have before. I know my goals for myself, my family, my work and have a passion for all that is intensified beyond what I thought I was capable of feeling. It's really sad in a way that it has taken 44 years of my life to feel like I do now. I always thought this type of passion was for other people. I'm overjoyed to know that I can share in this deep passion for life. I guess it was just always under the surface waiting to rise up. #LifeChangingEvent

First attempts at flameworking

My wife and I took a 4 week class in flameworking that just recently ended. I thought I'd share my first attempts at pendants. Enjoy!

Shatter Plate - with a twist

I started out this project as a gift for a house warming party. I was hoping to and up with a smaller serving plate, but ended up with an art piece. It was going to be a simple shatter plate. You take a hammer to a piece of glass and arrange it on top of another piece of glass. You can see in the second picture that when it was laid out in the kiln to fire it did not have a hole in it. When it was fired a bubble came up in the middle. I'm still not sure exactly why that happened. Not enough glass in the area? Defect in the glass? Who knows. The bubble was so thin that it popped back and forth just like the dice roller in a game of trouble. I decided to go with it and popped out the bubble and then ground the center out. I did a second firing for a fire polish, and then finally slumped the piece. We were able to pick up a stand on the way to the house warming and I ended up getting the project done in the nick of time.

Bottle Slumping

While I was on vacation over the holidays, my family supplied me with many beer and coke bottles. I'm starting to experiment with slumping them. Beer bottles first just to get the hang of it. I've actually not found too many sources on slumping bottles. I am starting to think people may be keeping there own firing schedules to themselves, trade secret. In any case I've started my first slump today using a schedule I found here http://www.bigceramicstore.com/information/Tip92.htm. I'll update this post once I have some results.

Segment	Rate	degrees F	Hold
1	500	500	12 min
2	500	750	12 min
3	600	1100	10 min
4	200	1300	20 min
5	250	1475	10 min	takes roughly 4.5 hrs to this point
6	9999	1100	1 hr
7	500	970	30 min	annealing occurs between 800-1000 deg.
8	120	750	20
Let kiln cool naturally.

I've now tried this process with 2 bottles. A beer bottle and a Mexican Coke bottle. Neither of them ended up with any vitrification, which is good. The Coke bottle did burn off the red in the label. I'm searching for a process to enable this to stay in tact. Perhaps a different firing schedule or spraying the bottle with the de-vitrification spray. I think people who have successfully done this are not advertising how they accomplished it. I'll report back once I try a couple more things.

Glass Blowing

I've been taking an 8 week glass blowing class at the Pittsburgh Glass Center, one of the best places in this country to learn. I plan on taking hot glass 2 and hot glass 3. After taking hot glass 2 I can apply to be a TA. I'm debating the time commitment  but it would be a good way to keep myself around hot glass a little less expensively. Why do I always like doing things that are expensive? In any case, here are some pictures.

A Tale of 2 Plates

I've been spending my time lately learning to blow glass. So i haven't taken as much time doing my fused pieces. Here are two pieces I've done recently. The first one I made was the red and white plate. The inspiration for this piece came from leftover pieces from my curling house bowl projects. I ended up with extra pieces of red that were cut into quarter circles. I thought it would look cool to make a piece where it looked like the pieces where spun around each other. It came out about how I would have liked, however I need to use a lighter red next time around. I'm not completely happy with the amount of light that comes through. I would like the red to be brighter with the white background.

The blue piece came from a picture I saw where someone used pattern bars to make a line down the plate. I tried to do that here with just a couple different types of glass. I plan on delving into pattern bars myself in 2013. I look forward to messing around with that. I have to get some equipment first. Dams, and a wet tile saw.

Until next time...

Curling "house" Bowl

 Concentric circles are extremely hard to hand cut, so I cheated. I managed to do the blue in two pieces but after ruining some glass attempting to take the inside circle out in one piece I settled on doing quarter circles. That lead to the idea of keeping the T line defined in the house.

I used Spectrum 96 for all my glass and the black stringers. A wispy clear was used over top of the whole design to give it an in ice look. I've used this technique before and I really have fallen in love with it.

 This piece got a lot of tickets (I was told the bag was half full) put in it at the Chinese auction for the Pittsburgh Curling Club, even though I didn't get it finished until Saturday morning and the auction was that night. All other auction items had been out for Tropicurl 2012 since Thursday night.

I love this bowl so much I am going to make another very soon just for myself.