Sequins, kiln unload, more salt & alchemy

At the studio today: unloading the first batch of kiln tests/future pendant blanks. "Blanks" meaning here that they are unshaped, raw pieces that will eventually be cut, faceted, and polished in a cold shop.

Testing laboratory glass slides with specimen wells, Glassline brand paints, white glue + mica flakes, Uroboros powdered colors and handmade sheet glass (blown cylinders from Spectrum 96).

Also continuing with the salt solutions––picking up and examining yesterday's dried vellums, and pouring new batches onto little plastic sequins to see what sort of half artificial/half crystalline formations we can create.

Carefully staged action shot...

Iridescent little flowers...

Examining one of yesterday's paintings in the sunlight pouring in through the skylight...click the image to see the studio shots.

We then moved on to organization. Over twenty different kinds of hand-dyed cultured pearls in all types of gorgeous nacred pastels and jeweltones, rebagged into glassine envelopes.

We had some sorting of silver and gemstones to do, as well...so I used my folded-silver boat ring from my very first jewelry class as a scoop...

Scars, hairs, African textiles from ASOS and my most favorite birdie scissors.

We've got the "gallery wall" on the close-side wall of the studio up and running.

Finally, my long-awaited copy of Cumbrian Alchemy, featuring the work of my friend/atomic priest Bryan Wilson and his colleague Robert Williams. You can purchase a copy by contacting artshop@cumbria.ac.uk.

Clean side/dirty side & new salt experiments

I've finally got the "dirty side" of my studio up and running. This is where the hazardous materials, messy moldmaking business, glass dust, enamels, wax etc. live. They are NOT allowed on the clean side of my studio! I picked this up from the age-old darkroom rule that you live and die by, which is wet side/dry side.

I still haven't found a good place for the mica flakes and glitters I like to use, though. They're so invasive they don't even belong in the dirty side, I think. Someday I'll have a boxed-in ventilation booth dedicated just to glitters...

Some sort of pastel crystal rainbow due to a trick of the light.

I've always been a huge fan of the nearly-colorless, white-on-white, especially if it involves sparkle––so, this week I'm revisiting poured paint solutions and substituting salt for pigment instead. I've tried pure oversaturated salt solution, which crystallized beautifully and left cuboids large and small bonded fairly tightly to the paper; I've tried pouring the salt water over pre-existing gouache paintings; finally, I've tried introducing liquid fluorescent pigment into pre-spilled salt water. All three have yielded interesting results.

I'm interested in MSG as a possible additive. The crystals are sharper and more cylindrical in food-serving form, but who knows what kind of fabulous larger formations they may form when diluted and dried?

The studio in Red Hook is growing & changing

The guys and gals at Supersmith have been working around the clock to improve the shop, which has this lovely open-floor woodshop among other great nooks. New people are filling out the studios every day and it's always fun to see what other people are making.

Supersmith communal woodshop

I've been doing some "home improvement" in the studio, too. Pegboard!

Also today was our first official kiln/electric test with the little baby Janus I acquired a few weeks ago. She got up to fusing temperature just fine but struggled to hit max firing temp at 2300°F. I gave up and canceled the program at around 1850°F (which is more than sufficient for most glass processes). Learning the Sentry Xpress 3-key controller is a bit of a challenge. I'm used to entering straight times per ramp/hold period, but the Sentry requires some math––you need to input the rate of firing rather than a chunk of time.

Chugging along.

There's a little brick damage and the elements/thermocouple may have to be tweaked following a full slump test (to check for hot/cold spots, etc.), but overall the kiln is performing wonderfully. I'm excited to start fusing some of the pendants I've been designing all month.

Holiday (Dimensions comics), old sketchbooks, jewelry coming soon

Three new galleries added to the front page. Check out a backlog of archived sketchbook pages and comics, and get ready for ready-to-wear jewelry coming this year.

Purge or keep? Dementia toybox

My only living grandparent, my father's mother Sun, is in assisted living due to advanced Alzheimer's. While purging the apartment this afternoon, I came across an ugly Tupperware box filled with foam letters and beads she liked to repetitiously play with. This was used during the interim period before she entered the facility and was living at home with my father. I'd been eyeing the box up on the wall unit all month but had put aside a house-wide deep clean until today.

Dementia toybox

What to do with ugly sentimentals? What to do with the belongings of people who are no longer aware of what ownership or objecthood mean?