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Accesory trade pin
Tonight I went to a potluck/accessory trade. Here’s what I brought to the table:
Obviously, not all of those miscellaneous beads from last week are as bad as I thought they were right after making them. I quite like both of these pins.
Jillian’s pin
Silverwork….finally
Here’s the first silverwork I’ve done in all of 2007 that required use of a torch. yay! Torchwork is lots and lots and lots of fun! Next time, though, I’m going to prepare stuff at home so that I’m ready to play with fire the moment I step in to the studio 🙂
(note that I probably won’t make it back to that studio until some time in January… *sigh*)
the other pendants
I almost wish FTP wasn’t back in business… I don’t care for the yellow one and I have no idea how it turned yellow. I imagine it must be related to the kind of flame I was using (it was just past neutral and into the oxidizing range of flames) and I bet I was working too close to the heat and burnt the other colors out. Hmmm.
boro pendant
Due to technical (FTP) difficulties, you guys only get to see this one tonight.
Finally finished this piece, too…. I made the bead some time last year and started twirling the metal and left it…. for months and months…..
three blue-ish pendants
Another experiment in photography using different backgrounds but the same lighting…. it still amazes me how different the same piece of glass can look just by changing the background material…. there’s dark green leather (my couch), a grey polyester blend shirt, and a fairly loosely knit pillowcase from India. (the ones not pictured here were a bright blue spandex, and a couple other darker textiles)
Round 1…. I was tryign to use warm colors (reds, oranges and yellows)… and… I decided I don’t really enjoy the orange effect I was getting this afternoon. I’ve put orange away for now.
Then I took a small break and here are the results of Round 2… in round two i selected a whole different set of colors out of the box… which (since they came from some random guy near Milwaukee) I have no idea what colors are supposed to turn out like what or if they are the kind of color that needs an oxidizing flame or a reducing flame, so…. the results of my playing with hot glass are likely to be pretty hit-or-miss until I figure out what’s what in the box of glass wonders 🙂 I do quite like the ‘celestial’ effects I achieved in Round 2… coming up this week? attempting to repeat an “effect” or a “design” in roughly the same size as each other… wish me luck.
boro pendants
here’s what I did this afternoon…. notice I started out awful, got a little bit more interesting…. then got worse again (#5) and then the last one was OK again… also, that first one took a bit over an hour (eeeek!) but the next ones took less and less time until I was down to about 15 minutes per pendant. I would have done more, but my arms got tired (and I got hungry). I guess if I start donig this every other day again, I’ll build up my tolerance 🙂
These are all borosilicate glass (a.k.a. pyrex) which has some qualities that are waaaaaaay different than the soft glass I’ve been doing up until now. Most noticably different is the reaction of the colors to the flame…. boro does somethign called “striking” and… I still don’t have the hang of it….. ALso, boro uses much hotter temperatures and requires adjusting the flame to be an oxidizing flame (rather than neutral)….
And then this was me trying to figure out which background to use… light? or dark? or light? or dark?