About my pension plan...

poppy dish

It is over 100 degrees today, so why not add to the heat by firing up the kiln? The poppy dish was yet another study in "think about it a little longer." This was a three-stage firing when it should have been two stages--one to fuse, and one to slump. The fusing went well.

There are two molds involved in the slumping process. The fused red flower with a black center is slumped on a ring mold that is set on top of a base mold (green on clear part) and both parts drop into shape. The top of the base and the bottom of the slumped flower meet and fuse during the second firing, at 1325 df for 40 minutes. Just like some marriages, though, this joining didn't work out the first time around. It took a third firing at a higher temperature, 1350 df for another 30 minutes to get the two parts to agree.

What I didn't think about (measure everything) is that the base mold is wider in diameter than the the top of the cone of the flower (ring mold).

The ring mold (way cheaper in cost than the base mold) had to be destroyed.  And to think I wanted to do this for a living when I retire. My pension plan better grow like mad at this rate.

Repaired bear panel

I don't know about you, but I'm worn out with this bear panel.  It is repaired and ready for installation--again.

I'm learning.

Wolf-bear?  Tiger-Bear?

I've repainted the bear's head and added paint to the neck this time, so hopefully the bear will not look like it needs a shave.  The boulders are in the kiln (again) and this time I added some grass and lichen--grass in dark green mixed with yellow and black, and lichen in yellow mixed with light umber.  I even managed to blend grass and lichen onto the already fired boulders that I could save.  So, all was not lost--I hope.

Bear and boulders.  I'm still learning.

Pride Goeth Before Fall

As I was sitting here at work, waiting for my lawyer boss to come claim his new medicine cabinet door front, which I had propped against the upper shelf on my desk counter (with the under shelf lamp lighting it softly from behind), it suddenly toppled forward and fell to the floor.  The boulders are broken, bear's face is broken, side, top and bottom panels are broken, a part of the smaller tree broke (if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise?  You can bet I MADE A NOISE!), and the sunniest ray in the side panel cracked in half.  Oh, and the small portion of the lake shattered. 

I get to do this panel all over, from creating new pieces to replace the old, to cleaning off and refoiling and soldering the entire project.  What this reminds me of is the time I made a huge unicorn panel for a doctor in Tulsa, OK, who wanted to used it as a coffee table top.  I had propped the finished piece against the attic door.  When the front door closed that day, the air pressure suddenly changed in the house.  This caused the attic door to blow off the hinges and crush the panel against the floor.  The pins in the hinges hadn't been replaced after a certain someone worked on the door earlier that day.

Moral of the story.  Stop propping up stuff that's breakable.

Medicine cabinet door panel is finished AND IT FITS!!!

Oh My Gosh!  I soldered the panel and lo and behold, it fits inside the medicine cabinet door frame.  I had to adjust several pieces to get there; and after lots of hard work the piece is finished.  Below are some pictures (of course).

soldered, with light behind it

with no light behind it

It's framed!  Yippee!

It looks entirely different from the backside.  It's really interesting to use the "wrong" side of glass facing the viewer.  The first mountain in the lake is actually wrong-side-out.  The right side has small glass stringers imbedded in it, which gives the hill an interesting texture.  The "wrong side" is what I used facing the viewer when the door is shut.  I liked the color scheme better.

view from the backside of the glass