Nature creeps in

Tiny glass plant
Originally uploaded by steampunkglass

One of the things that attracted us to where we currently live is the closeness to ‘nothing.’ Walk one way and it’s shops, train station, all the stuff you need. Walk the other way for a couple of minutes and it’s fields and hedgerows.

Not that I get to see much of nothing sandwiching my time between early morning train travel and all other spare hours working glass or taking pictures of it, but I think having so much nature around is really soaking into my work lately. I still make glass leaves and small flower marbles as colour tests without thinking of other shapes. The past week I’ve been trying some more outlandish plant ideas, which have been more freeform and quite liberating after the precision needed for marbles. It was my other ‘arf who pointed out how she could easily see which was the first and last, but not due to an increase in quality. Each had become larger, bolder, (and ever slightly crazier!) I’m not showing those yet, as it’s all still ‘work in progress’ – be warned, it’s nothing like more normal stuff

I try to limit my size normally as I have limited torch power, and I’m aware of the cost of the borosilicate colour glass when making larger items. However I think a size increase is inevitable, I look longingly at the USA lampwork magazines where $2000 torches are being use to make full sized bottles and the like. So I’ve been using my ‘Harry Pickup’ mode (as a previous post) and making smaller and smaller objects. One of which is a new sculpture of a plant with flowers in a pot, which is about 30-40mm high. I couldn’t even melt the punty off the bottom on this one, I was worried the heat would make the make the top melt and ball up! Not the sort of marble I want! In the end I ground off the glass rod when it was cold. I’m going to pop that in my esty shop later this week.

Back to nature, I was lucky to see an amazing sight back in the cold days of February on my morning walk to the train. I go over a small river which has a flood plane left populated by weeds, rabbits, dragonflies and more. There was a sudden commotion in the frosty distance and a baby and adult rabbit making sounds rabbits shouldn’t make! A stoat was trying to pick off the baby (he/she failed) and it was amazing to then see the strange, almost serpentine, way the stoat moved though the think undergrowth. I knew there were stoats locally but had never seen one before, and felt a bit spoiled to see one actually hunting too in real life rather than on a TV documentary. Not great for the rabbits, but an amazing site on a cold morning, and worth missing a train to stop to watch for a few minutes!