Did You Miss Me?

Egyptian licorice tea in the Chicago skyline mug, "Desperados Under the Eaves" by Warren Zevon on iTunes. Wow is it late! This isn't the first-cup-of-the-morning tea (that was Mayan Cocoa Spice) this is the after-lunch tea. The morning was consumed with a variety of tasks--most of them not glass-related--but I don't feel too guilty as I finished firing in the studio last night at 9:30.

I picked my latest pieces up from Duckbill Studios yesterday and it is apparent from them that the Morceaux de Verre transparent style is just not going to work. Both pieces show a very clear seam line which is not in itself bad, but at first glance it looks like a crack. The melt piece turned out *gorgeous* except for the punty spot on the bottom. For this one piece, instead of the punty leaving a bit of itself behind at break-off, it took out a chunk of the piece rendering it unfixable and unsaleable. I wasn't planning on selling it anyway, but getting it blown was expensive and I am disappointed that after all that (and the time hassle last weekend) it was ruined. Guess we were just too rushed and too tired at the end of a long blowing day.

For this weekend I'll have four more pieces in Cloudstone (screen and pot melts) to blow and those four (fingers crossed) and the one shown here will be the core of the Cloudstone roll-up series I'll debut at ACRE. Roll-up pieces won't be all I have in Cloudstone for this show either. I launched the series a couple of years ago but never really went anywhere with it because the metal work with Black Cat ArtWorks was really taking off then and I choose to devote the time and energy to it.

Tuesday I took a Cloudstone piece that I had made specifically to go in our new "Primitive" sculptural piece to Greenville with me to show Bill and Elaine and they really loved it. So now I have three forms for Cloudstone--rolled-up and blown vessels, glass and metal sculptural pieces, and straight kiln-formed functional pieces. Bettina (the second big Denver kiln) with her Dyson shelf also makes Cloudstone pieces possible in production as she was built for casting--higher temp, longer firings--and the large flat shelf enables all kinds and combinations of drippy glass.

The ACRE planning meetings over Tuesday and Wednesday with Bill and Elaine in Greenville were extremely productive. In a vastly efficient bit of overkill, Bill had a big screen monitor and a keyboard on the diningroom table so he could run the CAD software on his computer and generate scale drawings of our pieces, pedestals and wall display for us to debate and move around.

As a result, when we get to Vegas this time we won't (hope, hope) be looking at another 23-hour set-up. The real benefit to the design-before-you-go model will be a smooth set-up at the summer Buyer's Market show the end of July for Bill, Elaine and Todd while I am off at the instructor workshop at Bullseye in Portland. The views shown are of the front wall and the top down.

Bill and Elaine are the caregivers of four cats (two kids, a dog and two hamsters)and the largest of the cats, Mike, decided that he liked the warmth of my laptop and that it would be a good place for a snooze. Mike, not being your average-sized kitty makes my laptop look like a small toy.

("What?!? I'm sleeping here!)