Rocks Market panic stations

Ok, so I am now home and just as I walked in my door last Sunday night I had a bit of an epiphany........... my first Market (ever) at the Rocks here in Sydney was only 6 Days away. Needless to say the thought elicited a great deal of panic, particularly as I have been torchless for a while with the move and health issues and had virtually NO STOCK!!!!

I have launched into a frenzy of pendant making in response to my panic. Why Pendants you may ask, they are easy to sell, require no stringing into something saleable and hopefully will fill my half of the table if I spread them out a bit. I have had some fabulous advice from the ladies who go to markets regularly, but are still having that scary butterfly feeling in the pit of my stomach.......

I have been told that it is a place where many tourist visit and that I should gear my stock towards that........... Sea Turtles was all I could really come up with at short notice (have made quite a few before) and so I have been imploding boro turtle shells left right and centre.

Cross your fingers for me that the touristy types like sea creatures. Maybe the next market might have some koalas or something a bit more Aussie, but ..... out to the torch I go (big poop, I just remembered that I will need cash change too............. sssshhhhiiiiittttttttt)

Glass blowing & Pipe making madness!!!!!

What a fun week I had last week at Gail's Goglass Studio (http://www.goglassart.com.au/). A really fabulous glass pipemaker Dustin Revere (http://www.revereglass.com/) was out visiting Australia and Gail asked if I wanted to jump in for the week and learn some serious skills..... of course I did!! My head was spinning with the stuff Dustin could make - wig wag balls that he blew then opened and applied to blown articles, uplines, inlines and just AMAZING stuff. I definitely have somewhere to aim after having seen it done, but if you look around at the pipe makers stuff you will be shocked at the beautiful artistry mixed with the functionality of what is essentially a highly technical piece of equipment....... fun, fun FUN!!!!

Dustin showed us how to make our own coloured boro tubing using a vacuum stack method which was fun, but a little bit scary on the big Delta torch. Here is the finished cane and the left over end of the vacstack which I think I might heat up and make into a cool marble!

Whilst I was there I was lucky enough to also have some time with Justin Rossi of Imagine Creations (http://www.imaginecreations.com.au/) who specialises in ocean themed glass work with his gorgeous wife Amy who makes the most lovely implosion marbles and florals. Justin is the most precise technician I have seen work and one of the nicest blokes I have met in glass to date. Justin showed me so many of his techniques that my mind was spinning by the end of the week! Here's a pic of him at work.

Once I got home, here is a handfull of some of the stuff I have made this week. I have definitely been seduced back to boro at the moment and having fun with colour etc.

You may well be wondering "did you make a pipe" and well, the answer is yes (just a little spoon style one), which I managed to completely bugger up. aaarrrrrrggggh!

I am BACK!!!! From the half dead!

Yep I am finally back on board and have lit my torch for the first time in nearly 6 months.

The house move was a complete horror, but the high blood pressure that I didn't realise I had was causing complete havoc... and many, many VERY bad headaches.

Finally today I made some beads for the first time in ages and I decided to try out some ideas for a valentines day lampwork swap I put my name down for on beadingforum. I know what you are all thinking.... why put that pressure on myself, but I needed a massive shove in the backside to get moving and in fact are still are sitting surrounded by unpacked unsorted boxes in my lampwork area.... I am hopeful that the annoyance will force me to have a look through and sort them out... but the focus is rather firmly on the flame at present! I was inspired by Dora Schuberts lovely stringer work and made up a pattern of my own using corsets and lace as the them on a loveheart shape. They are fairly busy looking, but I hope my next batch improves a bit!

Here's SOME of my soft glass unpacked, I am embarassed to admit that I found a few boxes of rods from previous orders still in the original box and not unpacked at all...... blush!!!!

Dose of Molten glass for the lampwork addict please

Yep, I have been getting increasingly DESPERATE to lay my hands on some glass rods and melt them down into thier new life. I have unpacked my garage to the point where I can now step into my workspace and touch the glass rods in thier holders .....YAY .... but still not quite good enough.

So, whats the easy solution you might ask? Well, I drove over to Bilgola to my friend Gails studio and Halleluja, we melted glass together for a few hours. It is really on just feeding the craving, but like any addict, I am sure a small hit is better than none at all. I taught Gail how to make some complex murrini cane (which she did very well at) and she let me use her humungous torch (a GTT Delta for the afficioniado's out there) to make my first unsupervised paperweight. The decision to try out the stumpsucker and make a paperweight was a quick one and so I made a very fast and dodgy-arsed setup which took me all of 15 min to make..... bit of a shame, but better than an empty paperweight, or one with just frit inside. I made a couple leaves, a gumblossom, some aussie flowers (a bottlebrush that resembled a toilet brush and some non-sneeze inducing wattle) and the main feature of a red backed spider with one leg missing - fortunately in the preheating stage we managed to partially melt another leg so he is not lop-sided.

Here is a pic of the offending article.... please shut your eyes to the haze, the smudging and the REALLY shitty shaping job I did. This was the first time that I had made a paperweight totally myself...... yep, I was a bit scared to be honest, but it was really fun (not getting it off the punty) and hopefully they can only get better!

House move from hell, still unpacking......aaarrgh

I have missed the boat to do more torching in the cool weather I think, but here is a particularly unflattering pic of me in the middle of my messy boghole of a lampworking desk just before the packing up began......................... artistic temperament = organised mess (at least that is what I told myself)

Yep the house move from hell is over, but the unpacking is feeling a bit like the neverending story or groundhog day..... box after box after box etc. I am sure you who have moved themselves totally understand the pain. We have somehow managed to get most of the house unpacked (apart from small pockets of boxes in corners), but the garage is a real disaster and my lampworking zone is a particularly nasty quagmire of boxes and miscellaneous "stuff". I reckon I either need to lose about 60kg or not fit between the boxes to even reach my glass.... well to be honest the 60kg could come off irrespective of that issue, but we had better not go there :-)

Now that the rain is giving it a short rest here in Western Sydney I thought I might get some of this rubbish out of my space. I am getting increasingly desperate to set up my torches and kiln and melt some glass. My dreams of sorting out the stuff as I unpack and start working in a pristine well organised environment is very quickly being given the bums rush so that I can just get some lampworking done................ If I wouldn't set alight to the cardboard boxes and melt the plastic ones I might already have lit the flame.......... hey, thats one way to sort out the garage ;-)

Collabaration - different glass, another butterfly

Hmmmm, a great friend of mine Gail is very VERY talented at fusing and slumping and we are thinking of forming a team and collaborating to make some really interesting glassy things. I will still of course be sticking to beads and murrini as my core business, but the idea of making some larger and more unusual glass bits and pieces really sounds fabulous to me.

At the moment we need some planning time to get all our ideas down and form some sort of a priority listing so we have some goals rather than just run about ooooohing and aaaahing about our combined wisdom and mad schemes (we are both a bit the same, the crazier the better and we feed off each others enthusiasm)

My part of the "collab" will involve me making some complex murrini and small componentry in 96coe which should be compatible with the glass sheet Gail uses and to be honest a lot of the real skill will most likely be how she does her end. Thus far my only slumping efforts have been restricted to some bottles to make platters and "cabifying" dodgy beads (melting a cleaned up bead into a cabochon). In the week leading up to the move and sticking with my comfort zone I made quite a nice orange butterfly cane which I left as a graduated large diameter rod so that different sized slices can be cut..... all larger for the larger project, but some variety of size. Here's the pic of a rough slice of the finished cane. The great thing is that if I saw up the scrappy ends we will end up with some really cool fusing slices (half and quarter wings etc.).

Interestingly enough, I found it quite difficult not to pull down some of the cane for bead-sized butterflies..... Just habit I am sure!

Now..... I MUST go sort out some of my lampworking garage space and search further for beads.......aaaaaarrrrrrgggh!

House move from hell.... where are my beads gone!

Yup, my house is a little bit like a black pit of "stuff". We have been moving house over the last two weeks and now live in a massive pile of unpacked boxes! Moving from a humungous house to a smaller one has come with a large number of trials too......... WHERE ARE MY BEADS is the plaintiff cry heard more than once over the last few days!

My darling hubby Leo has tried to be very cognisant (big word for the day there friends) of the fact that I need a usable & safe space for my lampworking with adequate ventillation and no fire hazards. All this combined with limited space and trying to plan for correct storage of my rather large stash of lampworking glass is turning out to be a bit of a nightmare. I would take a picture of the carnage, but can't find my camera..... yup, packed!

I tried to limit the difficulties by leaving my lampwork setup and beading supplies until the very last, which I thought would be a "brilliant" plan so I could access my stuff quickly at this end...... no dice! I got a rather bad headache on the last moving day and had to leave it my Leo, he has managed to shove my stuff into boxes and plastic containers which are now spread all over the place - totally not his fault, I would rather have my things than leave them behind, but now I am needing some of my beading supplies and are getting rather desperate to melt some glass again I am getting slowly crankier by the day...

....hmmmmm, unpack kitchen stuff so we can have a home cooked dinner, or live off takeaway another day and continue the search for beading supplies................................... BEADING WINS!!!!!!!

Oh, here's one of the last beads off my torch before the move - I call her a Burlesque bead (think goddess with clothes!) This lady has gone to a lovely lampwork friend Trinar ;-)