T-Minus 8 days... and counting...

In a few days I'll temporarily close my Etsy shop (so if you have you're eye on anything please grab it before next Monday!) as we're off to Birmingham for the MCM Comic-con & Memorabilia Expo at the NEC on 16-17th March. This is the first time I've been at this event, so not sure what to expect - appart from the chance to get a really good Balti curry of course!

New test alien lifeform

What is familiar is the impending chaos and worry I haven't got/done/made something, even this quick shot shows how I'm already getting burried under boxes and bits. As it was, I was going to write this blog a few days ago, and not had a chance to until this morning.

Somewhere, I put it down here somewhere....

 Quite a few things have had to go on hold, including inventing new Aliens, however I couldn't resist the chance to show you this little fellow. He needs a little more work, as this was a test piece, then a few more to keep him company and then a nice rock to mount the colony on. I'd imagine he's a sea urchin, the tendrils ontop will have stinging points to catch any unwary alien fish, and grip onto rocks on the shoreline. I have been rather inspired after seeing a post about the Cambrian explosion of life, http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/18/weird-youth-animal-kingdom/ . This was a weird period when nature threw some very odd creatures together, it seems however strange some of my alien fauna and flora are, nature has got there before me with some really strange strangeness!

Evil Ruler of The Kiln Galaxy

Small Blue Worlds
Originally uploaded by steampunkglass

It seems at the moment I am at my most productive on a Sunday. Saturday seems to start slowly, plus this weekend I was completely shattered which is not great for being creative. Sunday was a different matter! I cleaned down my work desk and decided to leave the boro flowers for a while to use up my soft glass stash. This was about the time I realised how much I’ve come to love off-mandrel working! Twiddling around sticks of bent metal that are covered in potential harmful dust is not ideal (although I still love the smell when first heated, reminds me of my first time bead making.)

Second bead and straight in with 101-stupid-mistakes! ‘Putting hot sticky bead into kiln and touching other hot bead.’ Not a good start, although I think I saved one of them, albeit after having to reshape it again.

So enough with normal beads, thought I’d make some more of my ‘little worlds,’ which I’ve had some nice comments back about this week. I’ve been meaning to make some more for a while, and to try out some new colour combos as well. Suddenly it all clicked again, and from having mandrels sitting around gathering dust, and bead release hardening in the pot, I actually had to raid my drawers for any more I could find – even some part bent ones! I’ve filled the kiln before, but never this much! The kiln turned into a little galaxy of Planets!

I’ve done a good few with the classic deep blue, (as per the picture here) plus more of a nice pale green peridot colour. I’ve not listed any of these yet as for some reason I can’t seem to get any of these to be a close size match yet. I have had a go with some more ‘Mars Red’ and some fab ‘Indigo’ – yet more new colours I have yet to unveil! However I left the best to last, and think I have come up with some of the best little worlds I have EVER made! Even ‘The Boss’ was blown away by them, and that takes some doing! I am really excited about the way these are going now, the three hours for the kiln to cool was torture last night! The only problem I have is I only have a tiny bit of this glass left, and when I checked this morning found out because of the high silver content it’s about 12 times the cost of the normal blue!!!! Ekk!!!!! I will have to ration this stuff!

I will get these cleaned up later this week so I can make some new earring with them, keep a look out for the pictures as these really are worth seeing, until then I’m going to be mean and leave you wondering about them - after all I seem to be Evil ruler of my very own universe of little planets now!

I really must feed my subconscious more often

big shell1
Originally uploaded by steampunkglass

It’s funny how glass making can be come a kind of trance somedays, and that’s when the subconscious can sneak in and give you a nice surprise. I had a brief afternoon trip to St Ives the other week. Normally that would be great, except this was a cold and windy day, and we went there to try and clear our heads after a funeral in Truro a day before.
I must say I do like seaside towns when they are off-peak; you get to see the real place hiding under the plastic spades and holidaymakers. After a few hours cheerless wandering, I popped into a tourist shell shop, feeling the need to get something ‘positive’ however small and silly. I bought a small bag of chipped shells and one larger long coil shell, not even sure why. When asked what was in my little £2.99 brown paper bag I said ‘a bag of inspiration,’ although I felt far from inspired. On my return home the bag got left in a corner of my workshop as other routine things like washing clothes and buying cat food took precedence.
Then on Sunday I was messing around with some new techniques I’ve been trying, mostly involving making spirals trapped inside beads (I love doing spirals!) Some of them were taking ages to do, 45mins on a bead is a very long time to stare at the same thing, when in a lapse of concentration – or I think maybe my subconscious had a better idea – I pulled too far on a spiral, and then pulled a bit more, and a bit more, until I had these amazing shell-shaped beads, with little sea anemones trapped inside! Of course what I didn’t realise until after I had tidied them and tweeked them a little, that they were like that one big shell I had bought a couple of weekends before. I then looked on my desk and found I’d ‘doodled’ the same twisty texture with some other glass that I then didn’t know what to do with.
So, the moral is, feed your subconscious, even when you don’t think it’s paying attention!