Ornaments, shells, and butterflies

Forgot to post any December pix. Oops. Made lots of flameworked ornaments, flowers, goblets, plus some stained glass and sandblast (the glass flowers above are in a recycled wine bottle that I cut, blasted, and painted).

Now it's a New Year. My New Year's resolution is to exercise, eat right, and finish working my way through Lewis Wilson's sculpture DVDs. Ha. We'll see how long any of that lasts. I've also got to keep working on my goblets. Cleaner bowl shapes and cleaner, prettier connections.

Lately, I've been working on glass shells, and though they're very time consuming, I really enjoy them. Grew up near the Chesapeake Bay, so I'd like to try making glass crabs too. Also, I'd like to make some ballerina ornaments next Christmas, so I'm going to start trying human figures.

Painted goblets

More goblets.

The left two have been sandblasted and painted with porcelain paints. The right two have hollow stems.

Next time I should leave the blasting until after I've assembled the pieces, to avoid the flame-polished areas near the connections.

Still need to work on making my connections look better. But, the lips on the goblet bowls are more consistently round. The shapes of the bowls and feet are improving too.

I especially like the clear goblet. I think I'll make more in that style. Plus, I have a jumping fish stem that is waiting to be put into a goblet.

Cups and flowers, together at last!

Not perfect, by any means. But moving toward the sort of artwork that I want to make.

8.5" candleholder or goblet, with 3" ring made of Dark Elvis and filled with flowers and leaves from boro frit and rod.

9" amethyst goblet. The diffuse light makes the top of the bowl look fuzzy. Weird, because it's not. I guess I need to add a spotlight on top of the photo cube.

Curves in all the wrong places

Sigh.

I'm playing with an EZCube, for photographing my glass. I've heard that glass photographs better with lots of very diffuse light. I'm sure I'll have to experiment a lot to get the best effect, especially when it comes to highlighting dichro in the goblet stem. I think the flowers on the lower part of the twist are lost in this pix of the twisted stem goblet. But overall I think I like using the EZCube.

Still working on some new goblets. I'm trying to put a hollow fish in the stem of my new goblet. So far I just have a new gash on my thumb, for my efforts.

My favorite fish, made two years ago:

September goblets

Still experimenting. Still a long way to go. Sized 6.75 - 8.5" tall, at least these hold more than a thimble full.

back to goblets

6 1/2" tall boro blue goblet, with gold leaf in the hollow scalloped stem.

Taking a goblet making class has helped me a lot. My feet almost always spin out well, now, whereas before I could use about 1 out of 4.

I'm going to experiment with bowl shapes for awhile, and see how that goes.