Bad Blogger!

I am having such a good and full time at Bullseye that I haven't had any time to sit and write about it! We are hurtling through a sampling of Bullseye's teaching curriculum this week with an aim towards learning their pedagogy and improving our own methodologies. I am so energized by it all that I am hardly sleeping. Of course part of the reason I am sleepless in Portland is because my body is so confused with all this jet-setting back forth from the east coast to the west that it doesn't know WHAT time zone it's in! But wherever it is, the body is eating well. Shown at right is the causa morada appetizer at Andina, an incredible Peruvian restaurant where Bullseye wined and dined us all last night. Tomorrow night is Thai food at Dan and Lani's house. Good thing I have pants with expandable waists.

But we are doing more than eating well. So far we have sampled boxcasting (our pieces shown in the kiln at left), platemaking basics, and painting with light (our instructor Eric Whittemore shown below sifting powder). We've made sample tiles to take back to our own studios that will form the basis for the sample sets we'll use to teach our own classes. I've also played with several techniques that I can't wait to experiment more with including the aforementioned boxcasting and painting with light and playing with vitrigraph stringer and candle-bent stringer.

This morning we heard about marketing for the teaching studio from Mary Kay Nitchie, and this afternoon we are running through the glass cutting class. Tonight I hope to meet up with Cynthia Morgan--assuming we all live through he 105 degree temps today!

Tomorrow we get to plan our own sample pieces to make and take home. Do we want to make tiles that show how different colors behave at different temperatures? Do we want to have tiles that illustrate the relationship between the viscosity and the thickness of the glass at fusing temp? Do we want a sample set of all the reactive colors? How about a fusing differential across temps (tack to full fuse) for various glasses? There are many, many options open to us, and I need to take a bit of time tonight to figure out which ones are the most attractive to me so I can add them to the voting pool for the group tomorrow.