Old Hobbies



Cute baby makes a quilt even prettier!

A blog post by Diane Gilleland, one of my favorite bloggers, got me thinking about my quilting days and the joys of gifting my labors of love. I was never a very fast quilter, so even a simple pattern like the above photo took me weeks to finish.

The reminiscing sent me in search of our very, very old hobby pages that were last updated in late 2004.

So want to see what Scott and I were up to creatively before Ellianna was born? Check out his woodworking from his furniture making days. And you can see many of the quilts that I made too!

The last quilt I made, a high school graduation gift for my niece in 2007. I forgot how wonderfully colorful those butterflies were!

Photo Friday: Works In Progress

Currently in the kiln:

Making frit balls, fusing to smooth edges on Scott's striped piece, and using some clear powder on a couple of my pieces in hopes of avoiding sandblasting and improving the glossy look.

Meanwhile, here are some other photos from the past week:

Scott does the cutting, but Ellie chose the glass, washed all 218 pieces and assembled it into a 7-inch round..

Hard to get the lighting just right, but here it is after fusing before the slump. The center is a deep royal purple (that unfortunately looks black unless you hold it up to the light), surrounded by petal pink, light cyan blue, and neo lavender.

The miracle here is that I broke the 6-inch circle of red glass while trying to cut it. A lot of colors of glass would show a line where the break had been, but the red healed like it had never been broken! The hearts and flower shapes are copper foil. In person, the copper foil turned a metallic blue. So cool looking! Scott coldworked the glass on a wet-belt sander to smooth the edges, and after it's sandblasted, we'll fire polish it and slump it. I think it will be pretty!  

Isn't Rosie pretty with her borders? Can't wait to see her slumped after sandblasting gets rid of the devit on the lavender.
 



That's all for today! Happy Friday, and l'shana tova to those who celebrate!

Notes From the Glass Studio: Making Glass Flow

This is a new piece that Scott launched into after last week's debacle.

Scott doesn't let anything slow him down for long, not even the disappointment of seeing one of his projects come out of the kiln broken. He immediately started cutting class to make three more similar projects.

Meanwhile, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to capture photos of his technique!

Scott starts out by cutting strips of glass and then tack-fusing them together into blocks.

These blocks are made of periwinkle, white and aventurine blue glass (the latter looks almost black in this photo), and were used to make the piece in the top photo on this blog post.

Scott brought a few of those blocks into the house, and they totally mystified Ellie, who wanted to know how he glued the glass together. But they weren't -- they were tack-fused, which means they were in the kiln at a high enough temperature to begin to make the glass soften but not so hot or long enough to make it completely molten.

It takes lots of those blocks of glass to make a 9-inch-diameter bowl.

These are enough for two separate projects.

Once those blocks of glass strips are ready, it's time to let them flow.

First, Scott had to find a way to contain the molten glass since he wants his piece to be about three layers of glass thick. There's something about the physics of glass that makes it want to be about 6mm (or two layers) thick and it will automagically either flow out or pull in to try to make itself 6mm. So if you want your glass to be thicker than 6mm, you have to dam it to keep it from flowing out and thinning out.

Some people use steel rings, but they're expensive and you're limited to the sizes that someone else thought were best. So Scott made his own out of vermiculite.

To keep the glass from sticking to the vermiculite, Scott uses a ring of fiber paper. The pink underneath it is kiln wash on the shelf, which serves the same purpose as the fiber paper. 

The vermiculite is bulkier than steel rings (and takes up more shelf space!), but it's more affordable and certainly far more customizable.

The blocks of glass are positioned on a circle of clear glass. 

After arranging the glass blocks on the kiln shelf, it was time to put it all in the kiln and turn up the heat.

It's flowing!  Note: If you have a kiln of your own, don't open it when the glass is molten like this unless you have eye protection!

And then it's done with its first step. Next will come adding a border, using a sandblaster to get rid of the devit, fire polishing and, finally, slumping it into a bowl.

So pretty, isn't it? Scott really achieved his goal of making something that looked like a rose. 

Fused Glass Learning Experience: Thermal Shock?

Remember back when the only decision was which side should be the inside of the bowl? 

Just a matter of days ago, we were debating which side would be best for slumping into the inside of the bowl.

Scott did a bit of coldworking on it with loose silicon carbide grits to make it smoother and remove any devitrification, and then it was time to put it back in for a fire polish.

No big deal, right?

Heartbreaking, isn't it?

The piece shattered with enough force that it pushed the smaller piece off the ThinFire paper the piece sat on.

Unlike the last time this happened, this piece broke while the kiln was heating up. The edges where it broke are smoothly rounded over, so it doesn't even fit together cleanly anymore. (The purple and green piece you can see in that link broke after it came out of the kiln, so the edges were sharp and it was fairly easy to push together and fuse

Close, but no cigar.

The good folks at the Bullseye Glass resource center say it's likely that although the kiln fired on a fairly conservative tack fuse schedule (the initial heating was 300 degrees per hour to 1200 degrees), the thick glass (about 9mm, or three layers of glass thick) really needed an even slower heating schedule, somewhere between 100 degrees and 200 degrees. Sigh.

Although I wish it hadn't broken, it's kind of neat to be able to see the layers of colors in the glass.

The Bullseye techs offered several suggestions, ranging from intentionally highlighting the break (which is apparently a popular style in Japan) to fusing it with a solid circle of thin clear glass enough to let it flow a little, and see if it comes together in a way we like. Scott is leaning toward the latter, and we'll see how it comes out.

But the glass has already been through the kiln five times in its various stages, which is the limit of what Bullseye tests its glass to be able to do, so it's possible that the glass won't really be salvageable. That's what learning experiences are all about, right?

Which View Is Better?

This side was against the kiln shelf when originally fused, and therefore kept more straight lines. You can also see the points where some of the blocks of glass started out.

Scott has made another intricate piece of glass showcasing the way the colors flow. He just re-fused it after adding a very cool clear, black & white border using his segmented woodworking techniques. It looks awesome, whichever side you look at!

But now comes the tough part -- which side would be better as the inside of the bowl after it's slumped?

This side is more organic looking. It doesn't show well in the photos, but the dark color in the center part is aventurine blue, which sparkles. So this side is way more sparkly! :)

What do you think? Let me know in the comments, via email, or on our Facebook page. :)

Finished!

I'd hoped that the purple butterfly bush blooms would emphasize the purple in the piece, but instead the green leaves really emphasize the greens Scott used.

We're (tentatively) planning to deliver this beauty this weekend to the woman who gave us a great deal on the Bullseye deep royal purple glass is the focus of this piece that Scott made.

She'd bought the glass to use in doors and cabinets in her home, which is the most purple house (inside and out!) in Portland. She has an amazing garden in the front and side of her house (where most people have grass), and it's all greens and purples. Because she needed the sheets of glass to be larger than normal, she had had to buy a minimum number of sheets that was far more than she needed. And we snapped it up when she listed it on Craigslist. :)

To repay her generosity a bit, Scott decided to make something that we could give to her. And here it is, finished at last!

We slumped it into a gentle "sushi" mold, which curves the corners up slightly. It should be both a decorative and a useful item. :) 

Meanwhile, Ellie's piece was slumped this week and looks pretty awesome too.

Photographing glass items is even harder than photographing wood bowls with a glossy finish. That glare was present even on a cloudy day.

I think that's going to make some teacher very happy this December. :)

Back To School Before You Know It, And The Holidays Are Coming Too!



Just a few of the school supplies Ellie needs for third grade.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, school doesn't start until after Labor Day weekend, but I know that some schools in the rest of the country have already started.

Doesn't it seem like just last week that we were overwhelmed with the end-of-year school events? I'm still not sure how we got into (nearly) mid-August already and the countdown until school starts.

Despite the rushing around to buy school supplies and such, we have already started thinking about the holidays, including teacher gifts. Which is a little tricky since we haven't even met her third-grade teacher yet, nor her Hebrew school teachers, but we're pretty sure everyone likes a pretty piece of art glass. Right?

Ellie spent a big part of the weekend cutting squares of glass (with help from Scott) for a pretty dish that will likely delight a teacher come December.

It was hard to get a good photo of the colors Ellie used. But she had very good (i.e. expensive) taste in glass: Both the center rectangle and the pinkish squares include gold to make those pretty colors. I'll post another pic after the piece is slumped.

If you're looking for ideas for teacher gifts, consider this one, which was a combination mom-kid effort.