boring workshop stuff with no pictures

The past week has been very busy and this one starting will be too though we are taking a day off today. We are working on an etched glass commission (which I mentioned in my last post) and this weekend we taught the first two days of a three day workshop at Hot Glass Houston. We like to teach there...it's relatively close, it's a great facility and Bob's a really nice guy.

Since we have had trouble filling our 6 day intensive we decided to split it into a three day beginning pate de verre and a five day advanced pate de verre. This weekend was the first time to do the 3 day beginning. The students worked in clay making models for open face tile or block castings. By the end of the day Sunday everyone had two molds filled and ready to be put in the kiln. Next Saturday we meet again to de-mold the pieces.

This was a much better experience than the intense 'make-your-clay-model-make-your-mold-get-it-filled-and-in-the-kiln-by-the-end-of-the-first-day' routine of the 6 day workshop. The students had all day to make as many models as they wanted/could and to make a mold of one of them. The second day we started out making the second mold and then spent the rest of the day getting the two molds packed and in the kiln.

The only drawback is that the only place we can do this 3 day class is locally since there has to be a minimum of 2 days between the 2^nd and 3^rd days. I'm kind of working on an idea of running two 3 day workshops consecutively which would give us only one day out of 7 with nothing going on but we could travel to teach at other venues that way. If we were so inclined. We haven't much felt like traveling lately.

Another idea that came up over the weekend was doing a three day intermediate workshop using wax instead of clay, sort of an introduction to working with wax before they jump into the 5 day advanced and the two piece press mold to make the small cups. I actually think that is a good idea as working in wax is very different than working in clay and doing a three dimensional form as a first project is tough if you've never worked with wax before. Perhaps if we do the two consecutive 3-day workshops, we could do the first in clay and the next in wax.

I intended to take pictures throughout the class and I usually manage to snap off a few before I forget but this time, my camera never even made it out of my bag. Bob, the proprietor of HGH took some so I'm waiting for him to put them up on his site so I can 'borrow' them. (Hi Bob!)

Oh, and the other thing I've been doing is changing the look somewhat of the singles gallery page on my website. It still has the logo across the top and the scroll down menu on the left but I've organized the work by category instead of by gallery and I'm adding a little paragraph that tells about each piece.