plan b

the large cylinders that i have been working on for a while now, have not worked. this happens from time to time in my practice. it just has not worked. they were blown in the studio with the team, then cut in the cold shop without breaking them. here and then put in the kiln and slumped into large sheets of glass. all fine. then i made some stencils of an image to be sandblast into the panels. not fine. they just did not work out like i wanted. there are a few issues, the image i used was too detailed, i was pushing the limits, and that might have been ok, if the black layer of glass on the cylinders was a bit thinner, and the stencil overlap area caused me problems with the stencil blowing out.

it is disappointing, all that time and energy to make these panels, and at the last step it falls apart. but i have enjoyed the process, i have definitely learned a few things along the way. i could not use the panels for the original project, but i have not totally given up. i might be able to find a way to make them salvageable, we will see when i have had some time away from them, so i can return with fresh eyes. its hard to see in the photo, but it just didnt work as planned.

so onto plan B. i decided to make plan B simpler, as i had little time and resources left to make the piece. i decided to use flat black glass that is sandblast and fire polished, with a bolder image.

i got the materials, made the stencils and sandblast glass.

here is me in my respirator ready to spend time at the sandblaster.

here they are ready to go in the kiln.

and then plan B failed.

it is hard to see in this photo but the kiln somehow ran the wrong program so instead of going to 645 degree for ten minutes it went to 650 degrees for 6 hours! a big difference. basically at that temperature for so long the sandblasting almost got melted or polished out of the glass. although not enough for me to reuse the sheet of glass.

so onto plan C. to redo plan B. 

all of this has taken a couple weeks, but i finally delivered the glass to my friend andrew who i am doing the collaboration with. he has made a beautiful piece of furniture that my glass panels are showcased in.

here the panels are in the test fit at his studio.

this piece will be in a group exhibition that opens in 2 weeks. i will post some photos from that show as it happens.

new curtains upstairs in my sewing room

i love having the window in my sewing room open and uncovered in the day but at night i feel like i am in a fish bowl a this room looks out over the shared community garden space where i live. so my solution was to make some roman blinds. so last year i bought all this stuff to make some giant roman blinds in my sewing room. this is what i have had pinned up over the window for a few months now for a tiny bit of privacy and to keep some of the summers heat out.



and i am sure it could have worked even though the window is over 2 meters wide if i hadn't used such heavy fabric. BUT i did not think about this until after it was all done and hanging on the wall and not working.

the fabric i used i got on a super sale for $1.99 a meter and it is very wide. as you will see it is a bright zebra pattern and it is printed on a canvas like material. i also decided since this room gets used for sleeping in sometimes, to line this with 100% block out, so in the end the roman blind was SO HEAVY. too heavy to be functional.

after a few annoying moments of trying to make the roam blind work i realised it was not going to happen and by this point i just wanted to have this project finished. so i took it down, took apart most of the stitching and work i had done, cut the fabric in half and made some loops on the top, and now i have hanging curtains, but they do work. and they don't look too bad once you get used to the giant zebra being in the room.

my next project is more curtains for downstairs, hopefully i have learnt from my mistakes.

what am i doing?

so a while back i was invited to be in a group show about design. i was invited as some of my production work has a design feel to is as it is not very functional but still references function. anyways i had been wanting to push the ideas in my production work to make some new work and thought this was a good opportunity to do this. the vase on the right was the prototype i made of a functional vase (as it still held water and flowers) but also had holes in it playing with the layering of light and colour density and the idea of function through the holes. it worked well and i thought i was onto something. that is until i tried to reproduce it. i had forgotten that rule when you wander upon a happy easy moment in making and then spend the next few weeks trying to recreate what seemed so simple. it turns out that what i did in the first vase was not easily reproduced, or atleast i haven't figure out all the kinks just yet. in the above image the vase on the left looks ok but in real life there are many things wrong with it, too many to list here and there are many new issues i need to resolve before i will be showing this work in any offical format like an exhibition. not a complete loss but too much to resolve right now with my deadline only a week away.



in making the vases with the holes, i had also been inspired to a similar idea but totally different approach and process. and i thought it seemed simple enough so i quickly booked in a blowing session where i tried successfully again a new techinque i had never done myself, where you stuff a hot glass bubble into a colour cup to get the colour on the outside of a vessel. Usually the colour is on the inside layer of glass and the clear is on the outside. the above vessels are black colour on the outside and the white circles are this vinyl resist that i use to mask off the area i want to remain black. then i sandblast the forms and the black that is not masked off is removed to leave a frosted clear glass.

the idea here is to make the holes positive and to make more of an organic or random pattern appear out of the over-lapping circles. again the first step was easy in stuffing the cups, although now i am sure on my next attempt it will be much harder. but it wasn't until i got to the sandblasting that i got held up.



again in the image this vase does not look too bad, but this was the second attempt, after ruining the first one with a hole blasted right through it by accident. this one is an improvement but the blasting took a long time as the layer of colour was very thick on the bottom half of the form. in the future i will need to try and make this layer of colour more even and thinner like the top half of the vase. i still have many kinks in both the design and making process to work out.



so after many long hours, last minute effort and not to mention cash i now had two "new" unresolved products that were not ready for the deadline of the exhibition.

during all this making time i was also working at my day job in the glass studio during the first two busy weeks of the training program and working extra hours to get my work done and then doing my own studio time on top of it. i was exhausted and my spirits down and feeling like a complete loser. as is the way when you attempt to make things that look so perfect and easy and simple in your mind.



with no time on my hands i went back to the back up back up plan and put into the exhibition the finished and resolved work that are my whole bowls or simply a bowl with a hole. i have been making these for about 4 years now.

i make about 40 or 50 a year and sell them through a few retailers. by no means do i make a living off them but i do manage to put the money made from these back into my practice giving me the opportunity to have a studio space and have my practice pay for itself; which is the goal of my practice from a financial perspective.

more on the exhibition in the next entry.