Lampwork Lacework........ Cheezy but gotta try it!

After attending the Sydney Beadmakers group meeting at Goglass studio at Bilgola (an extraordinarily gorgeous part of Australia) after the usual shenanigans which involved lots of eating, drinking, oooohing and aaaaahing over each other's show and tell and lots of intense discussions about new glass colours and new things to do with old glass colours we had some demo's, one of which was by Emily from New Zealand (who's work can be found http://www.emilylake.com/). She did a couple of great demo's with boro work, an implosion and also some "lacework". I had seen the cheaparse lacework stuff in the $2 shop before and thought that it would be a shame if people thought that's what all us lampworkers spent our time making, like an Aussie version of a chinese glass making sweatshop - the only difference being the swearing is in English and not chinese!

After seeing Emily do it using some boro, I was bitten by the bug...... that nasty little bug that says in your ear "let try to do this"...... so Trinar one of the lovely lampy ladies and I decided to give each other a challenge to try it out and to post up the results no matter how ugly or unrecognisable it turned out. By some MIRACLE mine actually did come out looking like a little glass basket so I had to be happy with that.

Brace yerself............

You construct it sort of like knitting with glass, it was quite difficult to melt just the right volume of glass, maintain a hot seal (so it doesn't fall completely apart later) and loop around evenly time after time. I have to say that Emily made it look rather easy...... choke..... it bloody well wasn't!

I was quite happy with how it did turn out and the kids now want me to make something like this for Easter presents for friends...... but given that I really do think it looks cheap and cheezy, I think NOT!!!!!!

I was thinking that this technique might actually come in handy for a skirt for an angel sculpture of something like that...... otherwise it feels a bit like a dud! Very good practice using the glass manipulation skills though, so not a complete loss!