Week 28

Well...I was planning on tonight being my big worknight this week, but then Bob went and cut himself and we've been trying to stop the bleeding for 2 hours to no avail so...i'm going to post what i have. It's not a lot, but it's fairly detailed. Two glasses.

First, a green man design- i'd like to perfect it a little further, but Bob says he calls dibs on this glass anyway.

The second glass I made this week- was my final attempt at translating the daggers design to a wine glass. I've only done 1 so far, but I will probably make the other 3 for the original commission.

Sorry the pictures are a little blurry- i had the flash off and wasn't paying enough attention and really don't feel like re-taking them at the moment.

I also made another ear cuff- i think this one is kind of fun, but i'll have to add some glue to secure the gold rings to the green beads so they dont slide around:

I may find something else to do yet in the night, but there's only an hour and a half left in the week so I think I'm just going to shoot for a heavy load next week.

Week 27

I suppose I should apologize now, because you're going to be seeing an awful lot of glass in the next month in order to have some semblance of an inventory at the craft show.

The first thing I made this week is a henna inspired martini glass which i'm really happy with. It's all freehand so it's not quite perfect, but then again henna isn't ever perfect either yet is always beautiful. This is my first one and I love it- enough that this particular one may just be for me. It was really bad for my hand- one of these leaves my hand feeling the way it does after 4 of the others.

later in the week, I made 2 more of these. Each differs slightly, but I am definitely getting the hang of this particular pattern. I plan on coming up with other patterns, but for now I'm perfecting this one.

I really want to make a wedding set in this style- one of my henna books has pictures of wedding henna where one hand has the face of the bride and the other the face of the groom, and it's really beautiful.



I almost hesitate to show you the commissioned set I made this week, because I feel very critical of it. I must have washed these glasses and started over half a dozen times. I even cracked one and had to grab a fresh glass. You've seen a martini glass and shotglasses in the "Daggers Series", but I grossly underestimated the difficulty I would have in transferring the same design to a wine glass. It wasn't until the 4th or 5th try that I finally hunted down a roll of electrical tape to get the outer triangles as true as I possibly could on a curved surface. Due the amount of frustration I had with this set, I feel a bit of unwarranted bias against it and don't imagine i'll be making another of its kind for quite some time. Though I still feel like i can get a sharper angle than that so i might give it one more go....

Week 26

Week 26. Halfway. In the past 6 months, I have made over 100 headbands, about a dozen hairflowers, half a dozen copper feather pieces, 2-3 dozen handpainted glasses, and an assortment of silver and copper jewelry including pendants, chains, hair pins, and ear jewelry.

 In honor of this halfway point, I'd like to share that I got into a craft fair. October 23rd and 24th at Hunter's Valley Winery, I'll be setting up a little stand with wine glasses and jewelry. Not sure if I'll bring my headbands or not- i feel like my hodge podgey way of making whatever i feel like doesn't necessarily mesh real well for an art show, but we'll see.

This week, I made a set of glasses in the tree bark series. They're hard to take pictures of because there's SO much black, but in person they have a really cool optical illusion effect from the lines going every which way around the glass. These were commissioned, but I'm sure I'll make more. I want to take at least 10 sets of glasses to the craft fair plus a mix of single glasses.

I also decided to finally play with ear cuffs this week. I finally have silver wire in an appropriate gauge, and they came out pretty cute. I apologize that my ears aren't more photogenic :)

Bob wants me to make a bracelet we saw at Artsfest so stay tuned for that.

Week 25-Scratchglass

I needed a break from pewter- it was bugging me- and while hairflowers are fun, I feel like I need to do something else. This week we played with glass.

The main reason I stopped painting glass is that i find the lack of detail really frustrating, so I created what I call scratchglass, where I color block and then scratch away the pattern. The process is really trying on my hand though (my thumb goes numb.I stopped doing these over an hour ago and my thumb is still numb. Working on hunting down a different scratching tool with a thicking grip.)
I made a set of 4 wine glasses:

They still need cleaned and clearcoated, but i couldn't resist putting them up on etsy.

I also made a martini glass:

And I'm still working on this little glass for Bob for his port wine. I free handed it, so it's not perfect, but I'm really proud of it. Obviously it still needs cleaned up, but I'm not done with it yet.

I also started playing with beach glass this week, but there aren't any particularly cool results yet so we'll save it for another day.

I made some more stuff friday and saturday. Another martini glass:

Martini Glass-Dagger Series

And some shot glasses:

Shotglasses- lava series

Shot glasses- Dagger Series