Whoa, I`m going to Barbados!

Just a quick blog tonight, as I am now all packed for my Caribbean Cruise and cannot wait!  We are off to London tomorrow morning to see my family first and then to Southampton on Tuesday to catch The Oriana for a 22 night cruise.  Then 2 nights in London to see family and will be back home on the evening of Friday 19th October.

We have closed the doors to the Guesthouse and cooked our last breakfast, now it is time for us to be looked after.  All good intentions at the moment to visit the gym and walk the deck and try not to eat too many unhealthy foods - we will see.

As I promised I would post details of the classes and the first ones will be:

Monday 29th October 10am to 12.30pm    Christmas Decorations

                                    1.30pm to 4pm       Christmas gifts

Prices will be £30 for each session and will include use of all tools and equipment, all glass and materials for the projects including firing, and refreshments.

If you wish to come for the full day it will be £70 including a delicious lunch and £60 if you prefer to bring a packed lunch.

Your projects will be available for collection one week later or we can arrange to post them to you at post office rates.

You can email: terribunn@googlemail.com or phone: 01736 798875 AFTER Sunday 21st October when I am home.  Full payment is to be made at time of booking please via online bank transfer or cheque.  If you wish to pay via paypal I will let you know the extra charge.

Here is a taster of the decorations you can make:

small, medium and large Christmas trees that you can decorate as you wish

icicle decorations

and Christmas stars

it is difficult to see the beauty of them here

but I hope you can get some idea from the detail photographs

 you do not have to copy my samples and can design your own if you wish

snowflakes also look good and can be included in any of the shapes you cut

If you have time to draw your own designs  and bring them with along, you can then cut them out and choose how to decorate them from a large selection of frit, bubble powders, liners etc.

Well I had better get to bed as I have a long journey tomorrow.  See you all in three weeks.

Pizza in Woolworths

The evenings are certainly getting cooler.  I had a lovely night out with good friends tonight, drinks in the Harbour Pool Club first then pizza in Woolworths - well it used to be,  but the building now houses Pizza Express! 

Glass is very difficult to photograph for obvious reasons but the shiny, sparkly dichroic glass was even harder until I learnt a tip from Tanya Veit, another glass artist from the States.  Use a large plastic milk container, wash and cut in half, then place the pendant on chosen background and pop the container over , put the lens of the camera through the hole at the top and take the photograph.  

 I had to get the container from my friend Lynne as I only use cartons and then had to contact my friend Carolyn to ask her how to set the macro on my camera ! I am extremely pleased with the results, what do you think? 

I have some of my paintings displayed at Seagrass Restaurant in St Ives which is a fantastic fine dining experience that I would thoroughly recommend.   Last week Julia phoned me to say one of the customers had bought a painting, which was very fortunate as I was about to spend some more money on goodies for the glass studio.

This is what I bought - brand new tools so that every student will have their own set of tools and not have to share with anyone else.

I will be going on holiday next week but the classes will start week commencing 29th October.  I will post the dates soon but will not be taking bookings until I return on Saturday 20th October.
I will also have vouchers available so if you do not know what you want for Christmas these would be ideal.

Pimms on the patio

I have a wonderful view of the beach from our house and felt the need to re-create it, 

especially as it gave me a break from making samples, sorry about the flash reflection but here is my effort below

and below after firing and slumping into a shallow platter mould

quite pleased

it can get a bit tedious with the samples as we have to keep details of all the programmes and results in a log 

I use a lot of crushed glass in my work, essential to wear safety glasses even though below I was only crushing a small piece of dichroic glass (that is the lovely shiny glass you may have seen on some of the jewellery pendants)

Here are some pots with the crushed glass sorted by size

 and a box of scraps ready for crushing with my sifters so I can save all of it, even the tiny pieces.  You can buy it commercially made and it is called frit and is graded but is smaller than the pieces above

I am finally having success with my kiln after many firings and will post the results soon.  I am getting ready to go off on holiday and getting very excited so will try and post the latest results before I go.

Rabbits, kittens and kiln casting

It is the start of the September Festival fortnight in St. Ives and it has been a beautiful sunny day.  We have been to the Golf Club this evening for the Captain`s buffet, a yearly event and the food was wonderful, and with friends, who are great company.

Thought I would start including some photos of the family so here is the youngest:

above is Tinks who is a girl but when she arrived about three months ago was a boy called Wilson

and below is Marley when he first arrived over a year ago

back to glass, here is some I made earlier, which I made on the expensive week long residential course.  It was a marvellous course with so much packed in,  from the basics up to advanced stuff like the one below, which is a kiln casting, and I actually made the mould for this.  It is called the `lost wax method` and I was so pleased with it.

and below a wonderful solid block which consists of 5 layers 3mm Bullseye glass with metal, copper leaf, bubble powder and green glass, sandwiched between the layers.  We then used a special saw to cut the edges, and the hardest bit was handworking the edges, by circular motion with different, grades of carborundum powder.  Basically sanding it forever!  then we used another machine to polish the edges (cannot remember the name).

 unfortunately it has been knocked over a few times and the edges got broken! (cry).  It was such an amazing course at The Liquid Glass Centre near Bristol but alas it has gone into liquidation now.  Watch this space because I am told that it will be up and running again soon, with the original owners.  Below is some of the jewellery I did there too.

 The shiny bits on the pieces below are Dichroic glass which is very popular but extremely expensive.

most of the pendants below have a channel to put the chain through but one has a bail stuck on.  Not always reliable as sometimes the glue fails!  So I intend to teach only putting the channels in on my pendant course, there will be courses before Christmas and these make wonderful gifts.

I promised results of the Fragment pieces, shown below after they are slumped into a mould.  They are fired first to fuse the glass together then fired again on top of a mould, using a different programme to gently slump them into the shape of the mould.

 

I will be selling these, with a tea light in a little drawstring bag in the future.  Also there will be a course before Christmas, for students to make these and other small  items for gifts.

 for those of you who wanted to make comments but did not know how to, just click on the pencil, or `comment` word below and you should be able to enter it there, let me know if you have problems.  I would love to hear what you think.

Just like buses

Blogs are just like buses, nothing for ages, then two come along at once!

I promised you a picture of the table runner below

and close up detail, so the samples for the commission I showed you in the last blog make more sense.

I very quickly outgrew Frank`s class as it was just for beginners and frankly (!) he could not answer all my questions and I wanted to go onto more advanced techniques.  Also about forty per cent of my items were coming back with problems and since I have learnt more, some of them were due to how they were fired.  There were about twenty of us in a class and we all used whatever glass we wanted to:  Float, Bullseye, Spectrum but they are all different COE`s, which for the unitiated means Coefficiency of Expansion.  Simply put, as I said before, like cooking things that should be at different temperatures in the same oven at the same time.  Since we never fired them ourselves, as it was an evening class in a hall, Frank used to take them home, and however well they were packed, inclusions moved in transit as glue had not had time to dry properly to hold them together.  He then put them in his kiln and components moved around and fired them  and brought them back the following week and as you have seen, from previous photos several of my items were ruined.  Some glass is very expensive and I could not afford for this to happen anymore.

Unfortunately, at the time this was the only class in the area, so I had to save my pennies to go on a very expensive residential course.  It was a fabulous week and I will post pictures and details next blog.

I will show you a bit more of what I have been experimenting with lately.  

above more samples of the powders, frit etc. that can be included inside and on top of the float glass before firing.   Will take a finished picture tomorrow as I do not seem to have one.

Here is the beginning of the design for a fish skeleton

 The head, tail and spine cut out below and then I did some bones but did not take a photo

As you can see the finished piece was not that successful but I like the quirkiness of it, so will do another similar one, now I know what the problems were: devitrification and the wire was a bit thick for the thin bones so a couple broke off.

 It has been a beautiful sunny day today and I hope we get a really nice weekend, but the forecast is not as good as it has been for us in St. Ives

Several readers have told me they cannot leave remarks on the blog for some reason.  Can my experienced blogger friends who have managed to,  let us all know how it is done please?

Failures,Fragments and Fried Bread

 I haven`t managed to blog since June! but as I run a guest house in St. Ives I think I have an excuse!

 http://www.atlanticviewguesthouse.co.uk

Having said that this is the first time in fifteen years that I have had empty rooms in August.  It has been a terrible season for everyone I think and I think it is a combination of the weather, the Olympics but more importantly the recession.  The weather will also have a knock on effect next year I think.  Still we have lovely sunshine here in St. Ives for a few days at the moment, so must not complain and the September festival starts soon.  Deals on my website if you fancy a break and a superb full Cornish breakfast.

I may not have blogged about the glass but I have managed to get in the studio and do a bit, so to continue here are the results of the last picture I posted a few months back - disaster mostly! The kiln wash stuck to the back of everything and even though I soaked them in white vinegar, it would not  come off.  The temperature was obviously too high, but it is a learning curve!

 

I then decided to use some of my scrap decofloat, that you will recognise from the Jigsaw plates I did before, that is the beauty of working with glass, nothing goes to waste.  I used to hate wasting acrylic paint and used to paint on other canvases with it rather than wash it down the sink!

I really liked the samples and as they came out well have decided to use them in my range and they will be called `Fragments`.  I did not take photos of them when they came out of the kiln but will later post photos of some of them slumped into dishes.

One of the items I made on a course was a table runner, and it is very useful as you can put hot pans on it with no problems and it looks very decorative and sits on my table all the time.

will post a picture of it tomorrow.

My friend Liz has commissioned one of these but wanted a slightly different design and colour but in a similar theme.  So I produced a few samples for her to choose from.

and the results were very good.  She has chosen the one at bottom left below so I will work on this soon, she is moving house and does not want it until then.  I will need to use a friend`s kiln which is bigger as mine is too small.  Anyone that wants a table runner, just ask and I can produce it in a similar design but you choose the colours etc, they cost £100 each.

with the samples above the black bands are created using an aluminium tape, crumpled and stuck on then copper oxide is rubbed in.  I love the alchemy.  The copper oxide is quite a damp powder though and is difficult to sprinkle on as it clumps together.  So I experimented and put it in a spray bottle with water and the result is on the left of the samples below.  Just sprinkled on the right sample so you can see the difference but very pleasing effect and I just love bubbles!

These will definitely be appearing in my range and will probably be called `Bubbles` - I am nothing if not original!