One can nest anything when one tries hard enough.
Week Nine
13 April 2024 4:23 p.m.
Before we get started: All of my glass, inside, outside, and at work, survived the earthquake.
I threw some photos and notes up here on March 31. Let's see what I was getting up to two Sundays ago.
Getting to class early isn't easy. I have to wake up at 6:00 and leave the house by 7:30. I never quite make it out the door until 7:45. Even when I show up at 8:05 for the official 8:30 start, CP is already there. While I'm scrambling around, getting my color set up, my pipes onto the warmer, my heat-shield sleeves on, the bandana around my head, my glassblowing glasses on my face, and my blow hose ready, CP has already taken his first gather.
I decided to start my day by using the smashed-up bits of the purple and gold vase that cracked in the annealer last week. I gathered some white frit first, then rolled it in the garbage. I made a long-neck vase with a crooked top.
CP asked if I wanted to fix it, but I know that the more I mess with it, the worse it'll get, and then the punty will crack before I'm finished. Instead, I made a second one.
When my turn came around again, I had a chunk of poppy red rod on my pipe. That's when Sean and Dale arrived, followed shortly thereafter by Our Instructor and his new pup. I was convinced, now that Our Instructor was here, that I was going to screw up in front of him.
I tried to stay focused while he chatted with Sage. The pup started barking. Rose came by. It was a real party in there, with me trying to hold it together over at the glory hole side of the classroom.
Fortunately, he left by the time I was ready to finish the piece. CP brought me a slice of seed green for the lip wrap. The piece was too small, and I didn't get complete coverage. Things got worse after that. I lost control of the bowl shape and ended up spinning it out into a four-sided floppy fail.
The red was supposed to be opaque, but the top half of the bowl turned translucent.
CP was up. I went over to help Sage. Our Instructor returned. Sage was working from a rod she'd made herself by mashing up a bunch of opaqe colors. Sage sat looking at it, deciding what to do next, flummoxed by the shape. "Different colors blow out differently," Our Instructor said. I knew this already because he'd said it many times in class, and I've experienced it more times than that myself. Wait. Was he teaching just now?
I chatted with him a little about what I'd been doing this semester. "I've been going back to basics, working on lip wraps."
"Lip wraps are hard," he said, and then he gave me some advice. While he wasn't looking, I turned to Sean and Dale and mouthed, "He's teaching!"
I tried for a seed green bowl with a poppy red lip wrap. This one was smaller. I made a bad jack line. "Niagara Falls!" I said as I dropped spot after spot of water on it while Sean recorded us working. It came off the pipe onto the punty eventually. Again, I didn't give CP enough color to get the lip wrap all the way around. I lost control of the shape again and spun it into a plate.
I didn't really want a plate, much less one with an incomplete lip wrap, but the spinout was showy and the plate flat. When I couldn't knock it off the punty, I went back into the glory hole for a quick flash. I heard a crack. I took it out and, on my way to the breakoff table, the plate exploded spectacularly.
It was almost in slow motion: first a big chunk popped off and crashed to the floor, then the rest of it followed suit. Some fragments landed a foot away from where Sean and Dale were sitting near the big oven. There was glass in every direction. I laughed, shrugged, and grabbed a broom.
Lesson learned. Don't go back into the hole with a plate.
Meanwhile, in the administrative world, more locker shenanigans were afoot. Now we all had locker numbers and our names in tape. Still, there was no word about when or how we'd get our lockers back next semester.
I spent the rest of the day, including during my afternoon penance bike ride, trying to figure out why I could no longer make a bowl. Didn't I make two a few weeks ago using Low Key's discarded plates? And what about the large one I eat salads from every night? Or the ones that are holding ornaments?
The next day, I proceeded slowly, cafeful and focused. I stared with frit while the little oven heated the rods I'd use later.
Frit is easier for me to control than rods are. I used white on the core, then ran the gather in a quick coating of Rose's large-size Jewel Tone mix frit that I had left over from last week.
My first try was a little wonky, but it was a bowl. Like all of my off-center pieces, it had a good side:
And several bad ones:
I tried again. This time the shape was better because I flared the top a little.
CP helped me make another seed green with poppy red lip wrap bowl from a rod. This time, I got the lip all the way around, but I totally flubbed the alignment.
On my next turn, we reversed the colors with a poppy red base and a seed green lip wrap. I whiffed on the wrap again, matching my earlier mistake almost exactly.
At the end of the night, with about 15 minutes left, I offered CP a turn, but he told me to go. I used the remains of the jewel mix, and to save time, went into the square mold. In a last-minute decision, I asked CP to bring me a bit for a handle.
With his guidance, and after having watched him so many times, I did better with the alignment.
This color was so much fun to use that I decided to break my no-buying-color-this-semester rule and get myself half a kilo.
One of my biking buddies had suggested I try to make nesting bowls. I'm still obviously working out the bowl part, but I did get them to sit on top of each other. It's not exactly nesting in practice, but the spirit is there.
My routine is to stop by the classroom on Wednesdays after work. Now that the Wednesday night bike rides have started up again, I've been antsy about being able to get my work, sand the bottoms down, and also go on the ride. Fortunately, I suppose, we'd had three weeks of rainy Wednesday nights. So I didn't have to scurry over to Washington Crossing. Instead, I went home and had dinner on my fine China.
Glooskap helped.
Week Ten
CP says he always likes to start off with something tried and true. That's why he always begins with a pitcher. I often do that too, but today I decided to leap into rod bowls with lip wraps first thing.
I started with a cornflower rod and a violet lip wrap. This time, I'd cut a chunk big enough to go all the way around, but it was messy and uneven. Things seemed to be going well enough otherwise, until the last minute, when the top and sides, hot and thin, went all doolally. I spun it out.
Because the wrap was uneven, I knew it would spin out uneven. When I pulled it out of the glory hole, a gloop of wrap swung out beyond the bowl. CP cut it off and we fire-polished the spot before I put it away.
CP and I talked about the best place to stand to bring a lip wrap. I saw him grab some chalk while I went again, at his insistance.
On the floor, he'd drawn the outline of two feet, and in between an X with the words "lip wrap" each taking a foot.
Dale and Sean arrived. While CP gave Sage a hand, I went slowly, carefully, and timidly, making a small violet bowl with a cornflower lip wrap. The size was small and the shape, but at least it looked sort of like a bowl. After looking at it for a few days, I've decided that it's going back to the classroom. I'll blow into it with another color (maybe violet?) and try to get a bowl out of it.
CP's big work of the day was one of his dramatic sculptural pieces. I was glad that Dale and Sean got ot witness the drama as he pulled the piece out of the glory hole, molten, and used most of the space in the front of the room to swing it out, the top drooping between sagging threads of color. I know I'm not describing this well. Let me go find a photo of one of these. Geez. I had to go all the way back to 2019. His current ones don't look exactly like this, but you get the idea.
(Nope. Blogger thinks it looks like a d*ck or something.)
After having watched Rose do an overlay with a thin sheet of dicrhoic glass, I broke my no-color rule again and bought some of my own. I thought I was ordering a different set from a different vendor, but when the box arrived, it was the same as the set she had. I blame Amazon. And also, is a pack of fusable glass squares in such demand that it shows up on my doorstep the next day?
Anyway, I'd laid out three sheets in the big oven, least favorite on the left. I picked up the one on the left first. It became a vase. I decided to use it as a submission, along with the Junk In The Trunk double-cup and one of last semester's geodes, for the spring student art show.
I'd considered submitting a shiny vase I'd made last semester, but I decided instead to use the same colors again. If things turned out well, I'd submit this instead of something else.
I told myself to check my notes to make sure I'd get the colors and sequence of threads correct, so of course I forgot to do that.
At least I remembered the colors. I wound up with a narrow vase that reduced so well under the big torch flame that one side became a mirror when I took a photo of it in the annealer. The flame bit was more fun drama for Dale and Sean to watch.
I ended up giving the vase to a friend as a belated birthday gift (more precicesly, I'm about to; we'll see them in an hour).
Pumpkin Master was in upstate New York, chasing the eclipse on Monday. The tech filling in for him turned on the wrong annealer. The one with yesterday's work got hot again. The one we needed to use was still cold and full of Saturday's glass. We lost an hour waiting for it to reach 975 degrees.
Low Key was there to make up a class. She left and said she'd come back next week. I used the time to cut the top of the purple and white vase with the crooked neck. I had time to wet-sand it down to a shine.
The delay was advantageous for two other reasons: It meant that the big oven got to 1050 degrees just in time for CP to arrive and for us to get to work.
I coated a bubble with white frit again, then picked up one of the squares. I tried spinning the bowl out but not flopping it. The bowl got low and wide, a little oblong, and all the color I'd been hoping to show off ended up on the outside bottom. That was an unforced error on my part.
I liked it enough not to discard it, but not enough to want to keep it. I gave it away to one of the Hill Slugs after Wednesday's ride (not rained out, finally).
The next one worked much better. I took a hint from Rose (absent tonight but present yesterday when I was making my first overlay) and pulled the color up from the bottom while the glass was still on the pipe. I was more careful spinning out, and the shape was, finally, what I'd been after all this time.
When I tried to repeat it using the mirror colors I'd used yesterday, it all went to hell. The glass was too thin in the middle. It began to bulge when I was opening it up. All I could do was spin it out. It went hat-shaped and curved in on itself, the mirror finish obscured by the messy flops.
After I got home, I decided that I'd bring it back to the classroom and blow into it with a clear bubble. Might work. Might suck.
At the end of the night, my half kilo of Jewel Tone mix having arrived, CP and I made a happy cat.
Speaking of cats, Clementine, now nearing 10 months old, has found something new to jump on. This cabinet has already said, "Earthquake? What earthquake?" I'm happy to report that it also said, "Kitten? What kitten?"
