if it could go wrong...

It's been more of the same. Hot, humid, dry. Though a 'cool' front came in heralded by the 5/8” of rain we finally got Monday night. What that means is the high temp will only be 89˚ - 91˚ for the next week and last night (it did) and the next two nights will get down in the 60˚s! Unheard of this time of year. It was 71˚ when I ventured out at 8:30 this morning, cool and dry as in not humid. Very pleasant out.

There was a time when I sat down to fill a mold I would do it in one sitting, usually about 5 or 6 hours. It was really necessary when I was doing all those small bowls since I was working on a slope. These days it takes me days to fill a mold, work a couple of hours and that's enough for today, day after day. It's easy to walk away from filling an open face mold (of which the heron head inlay is an example) because there's nowhere for the glass to fall down to. This one took me four days. 

The main image I'm working from.

First find the most round correct size chunk of black glass for the pupil of the eye;

mix a little med amber and light amber for the eye and pack that in, a little midnight blue beneath and between the eye and the beak, a little spot of lt amber, a little bit of translucent white above the eye, a bit of pale yellow on the cheek, cover the eye and cheek with translucent white, add the black for the crown;

marigold yellow and medium amber in the beak, build up more of the trans white;

paint a little black powder in stripes on the outside edge of the neck and cover with white powder, sift in lt. sky blue powder, some lt. bronze powder in spots on top of that, lt. silver gray powder over all on top of that, then because I wasn't sure if I had enough silver gray powder I sprinkled in a layer of silver frit (and in this picture it came out so dark that now I'm afraid I put in too much and it will be too dark), build up more amber in the beak, black in the crown, trans white on the cheek;

build up more amber in the beak, black in the crown, and cover everything else with trans white;

mound up translucent white over the whole mess, worry about the silver gray being too dark, uncover a portion of neck and try to do a depth assessment of the colors underneath, decide that maybe it's OK and cover it back up;

and now it's in the kiln.

Then I moved on to the disaster part of the day yesterday...the mold for the box.

My first mistake was thinking I could make (I did) and use a cardboard box for pouring the mold even though I used thick cardboard. We have used these successfully for small castings. This was not small, this would need over 6 pounds of glass. The second mistake was not rigging up a support system for the sides of the cardboard box so when Marc poured the plaster/silica mix in the cardboard got soggy fast and bulged out on all sides so that the amount mixed did not adequately cover the entire wax box model. Well, fuck.

 Bad but not unfixable so he topped it off with a small second pour which resulted in a bulgy convoluted weak at the bottom mold but he got it steamed out and if I had left well enough alone, all would have been fine. But me, who can't leave well enough alone, I decided I would try and carve off some of the excess plaster on the sides of the mold and to do that it had to be very wet so the third mistake was I rehydrated the mold, carved away, got it to a more uniform shape and somewhat thickness, took it outside, rinsed it off, turned it over to pour the water out, aaaand the core fell out. Well, fuck fuck. 

OK, I can deal with this, just set it back in and it's weight will hold it in place. Next was to do the volume measure which as I have explained previously entails filling the mold with water and doing some math. I did this without the core in place because reasons figuring I could do a separate but similar process to determine the volume of the core, do a little math and voila, I would have my volume measure only when I went to pick up the mold and pour out the water, the second small pour of plaster/silica separated from the rest of the mold and over half a gallon of water was released all over me, the table, and the floor and now my mold was in three pieces and I still did not have my volume measure. Well, fuck fuck fuck.

Marc suggested reassembling the mold in a basin with the core in place, pouring the water in which would immediately begin to leak out, remove the pieces of mold from the basin and then weigh the water in the basin. OK, that will work and it did only now not only is my mold in three pieces but all the water and messing around has made the inside of the mold start to deteriorate. Well, fuck fuck fuck fuck. 

So now I'm ready to weigh the water and my digital scale that got doused from the previous minor flood is muerta (dead for those who don't know any Spanish) godammitall  so off I went to the Evil Empire to get a new scale and finally weigh the damn water and get my damn volume measure. I'm not touching it again until it is completely dry and I'm ready to reassemble it,  fill it, and fire it.

I think I can redeem the whole thing with a lot a lot! of grinding and cold work but if I manage to pull this rabbit out of the hat it will be a fucking miracle.