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?