Today was a busy day. Lisa and Sean's main job was to continue work on the huge slumped glass panel that they are creating for the Ranamok Glass Art competition - the last day for entries to be accepted is next wednesday, so they have got a lot to do to get it ready to be photographed by then. Sean has spent much of this week cutting out hundreds of tiny leaves from ceramic fiber paper and today he constructed the slumping mould. The glass has been laser-cut into the overall shape and is ready to be slumped.
The mould before all the leaves are put on.
go into the kiln for slumping.
While Lisa and Sean were busy with the tree, I got my fish design ready to go into the kiln. All the pieces were cut from ceramic fiber paper and then assembled on a plain bisque fired platter. Once everything was in place I had to paint over the whole piece with kiln wash to make sure that there is nothing that the slumped glass can stick to. Once dry, I lightly brushed over the surface with my hand and a soft paintbrush to get the surface of the kiln wash as smooth as possible. The piece is now ready to slump my glass.
Fish Platter
This afternoon I assisted Mia with blowing again. This time she was trying to create a vessel with a round base and narrow neck. We have worked together a couple of times this week and are getting better - we are fine tuning our techniques and refining our rhythm now and so are having more success with our blowing - we are getting used to where the hot and cold spots are in the glory hole and working out just how much time there is to work the glass between reheats. We've also been practicing making punties -the blob of glass required to transfer a piece from the blow pipe to a punty (a pole with no hole through it) and we are getting better - every piece apart from the first one, made it into the annealer without cracking the base!
Pulling the neck out on the vase.
