No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

No UPS deliveries on Sunday, so no orange glass. I had to get my glass-cutting fix by re-doing the bottom of the panel. I wasn't happy with the orange-green stuff I had used, so out it went (most of it) and I got out some glass I had been terrified to cut. See all of those ripples? They are very deep and breaking this glass, once it has been scored, is not easy. This glass has a mind of its own. It likes to shatter at unexpected times, or run any which way except the way I scored it.

I cut, and I cursed, and I re-cut it, until I finally gave in and made mostly straight cuts. The finished pieces were held to the grinder to get the curves I wanted, and to grind a bevel onto the back of each piece so I could foil/lead it.  I used part of the orangey green glass for reasons only known to my mind alone.

In my box of tricks I found an amethyst geode slice, and ground THAT down, as well.  No one expects the Spanish Inquisition, and nothing is safe from my grinder!  Nothing.

Hooked on Uroborus glass.

I'm still waiting for the right shade of orange to come along for the koi in my panel.  Gee whiz!  How many different shades of orange ARE there?  Obviously my eye hasn't seen one I like yet, and my glass bins runneth over with every shade but the right one.

In the meantime, the lily pads are working out well, and even though I plan on painting and firing the eyes, scales, and fin spines whenever the right shade of orange happens to get to my front door, I've indicated the eyes with green glass globs which make the fish look drugged out...koi on crack. They are dead-in-the-pan-looking fish right now. Maybe it's the expression on their faces. I have yet to meet a fish with a sense of humor. The snail is a fossil (like me!) but I love her anyway.

The bottom of the pond is pumpkin/green Uroborus (I love this stuff) and the top of the geode slice is where a line of lead begins. This will run "behind" the fish up to one of the lily pads. There will be other stem-like lead lines running vertically in the panel as well. The water glass came for the top of the panel, but my day job keeps me from getting home in time to cut glass.

Koi panel begins

While I'm waiting for some new glass molds to arrive, I though I'd start on the koi panel for the A.V. cabinet door.  I'm using some gorgeous teal blue Uroborus mottled glass for the water.  I found a small fossil at a gem show and thought I'd add it, climbing up a water plant.  The glass for the koi, the bottom and top of the panel should arrive soon.  This panel will be a mixture of lead and copper foil.  It is not entirely my own design...sigh.  Drawing fish is not my forte.

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.