one disaster led to another

My luck ran out and that disaster of a mold produced a disaster of a casting. No amount of cold work can make this usable. I'm not sure why it cast so badly, need to consult with my gurus. If I want to make this piece, I have to start over with a new wax model for the box. I've already pulled out my drawings and made a list of sizes for the wax slabs. I'll start on those tomorrow while I'm grinding away on the heron head and the egg. After another hour and a half yesterday morning I freed the sticks. It was after I came back from that that Marc showed me the box. Well, I know a few things I'll change. The color for one. I like it but not enough contrast with the heron. I'll go darker blue. And no billet. From what I can see, I don't like it. I think I'll do some color samples, see if I can come up with a combination with enough of what I have on hand. I may also not carve the wavy lines if I can come up with a texture I like  or do them differently because I'm not sure I like them.

As mentioned, I finished taking all the excess glass off the sticks.

This morning I got up at 7 AM, went out and watered for 45 minutes and then went over to the shop where I set up and poured the wax for four of the six slabs I need to remake the model

and used the ring saw to cut off most of the extra glass on the heron head inlay 

and then ground off some of the thickness. Came back to the house at 9 AM for my coffee and then back to the shop about 45 minutes later where I used a different machine to grind off the excess glass on the egg and then finished it off on my make-shift flat lap, back to the house for Sunday brunch at 11:30 AM and then back to the shop to set up and pour the wax for the last two slabs and the 1/8” thick sheet and back to the house at 1 PM.

So yeah it's hot and we've exceeded the high 90s forecast and have hit triple digits and I may be done for the day, except for maybe doing the dishes that I've been ignoring while I've been working over at the shop the last three days (and no, I'm not going to show you a picture of my messy kitchen) but not for a while yet.

myth verses reality

This is long and I've written about our nation's gun problem before. I debated whether or not to post it in two installments but decided to just get it over with. Read it or don't.

I just don't know what to say. It is so crystal clear and yet so many refuse to see. Every study, all the research, comes to the same conclusion over and over. More guns equals more gun violence. States with more guns per capita have more gun violence. States with less guns per capita have less gun violence. And gun ownership has no effect on the crime rate. In fact, gun ownership increases the likelihood many times over that the gun owner or a member of the gun owner's family will suffer from death or injury by that gun. Women are 7 times more likely to be killed by a loved one if that person owns a gun. Children are dying by the hundreds because there is a gun in the home.

The NRA has convinced a large segment of the population that the only thing standing between themselves and chaos is a good guy with a gun, preferably themselves but that's why we have a police force. That's their job. The NRA's creed of an armed society is a polite society has filled this country with guns. As it stands now, there are enough guns in the population for every man, woman, and child. And still the gun nuts don't feel safe.

This is what it has come to. With the exception of the instability in the Middle East, the drug wars in Central America, and some rogue African nations, America is the most dangerous country in the world and the danger comes from our own citizens. You wouldn't expect the biggest 1^st World nation to also be the most dangerous. But we are. Now instead of just worrying about being killed by the police with their tendency to shoot first and ask questions later, we have to worry about every stranger on the street as well.

Cases in point...

1. A man witnesses a carjacking and whips out his gun and starts shooting. He does not stop the carjacking and shoots the victim in the head instead. Then he gathered up all his shell casings and fled the scene.

2. A woman witnesses a man coming out of Home Depot being chased by a store employee. The man gets in his car and starts to flee the scene. She whips out her gun and starts shooting at the fleeing car. She does not, in fact, know whether this man has shoplifted anything and yet she takes it upon herself to shoot at him instead of just taking down his car license and a description of the vehicle to give to police.

In both these instances, which happened in one week, these citizens appointed themselves judge, jury, and executioner. In the Home Depot case, she didn't even know if a crime had been committed. And since when did we give start giving the death penalty for theft? They are lucky they didn't kill anyone (the head shot victim lived). The woman could have killed a child in that car or the driver whose moving car would have then careened into some other family or she could have just as easily shot one of the many people who were in the parking lot.

This is called vigilantism and it is against the law. Just because you have a license to carry does not mean you can whip out your gun and start firing away anytime you want to. The law is very clear about when you can use a gun to protect yourself or someone else and theft, not even of your own property, isn't one of the reasons. You can see a thief carrying your fancy TV or whatever out of your house and you still cannot legally shoot and kill that person.

Did you know that the only time a gun buyer is subjected to the briefest background check is when they buy a gun from a gun store? Once a person owns that gun, they can sell it to anybody they want as long as that person has the money to buy it. No background checks needed. You also don't need any kind of background check to buy a gun on-line or at a gun show. There is no limit on how many guns you can own or how much ammunition you can buy.

Here's a few myths that need dispelling...

Good guy with a gun: well, I think that one has already been addressed above but in the case of mass shootings about which the NRA loves to tell us the solution is more guns, anyone who is not highly trained is not going to be effective and will likely just get themselves shot or shoot other innocents. Any combat veteran can explain the fallacy of John Doe citizen bringing down a shooter while all hell is breaking loose. Target practice or plinking at cans does not equal 'highly trained'. Target practice or plinking at cans is not going to give you the training to ignore that adrenaline dump with your brain screaming at you to run away while scrambling for your weapon with trembling fingers. You are not Rambo and real life is not like the movies. And even in the few cases where a good guy with a gun was present and did manage to prevent or stop the shooter, the few lives saved does not in any way make up for the thousands who are killed by the over abundance of and easy access to guns in this country.

An armed society is a polite society: Right, that's why people with guns shoot at other cars in road rage. That's why people get in an argument and before you know it, someone has pulled out a gun and started shooting. That's why these open carry idiots strut around with their guns and get in your face and insult and threaten you because you don't agree with them. That's why back in the frontier days the sheriffs made you check your guns in at the office when you came to town.

If you ban guns, only criminals will have guns: You do know where criminals get their guns, right? They get them by buying a weapon that has already been legally purchased or they steal them from people who legally purchased them. Less guns in the population means less guns available to criminals. Did you know a gun company created a gun that would only fire if it was being held by it's owner? Yeah and the NRA put all it's might behind making sure that it didn't make it to market or failed to find buyers.

Guns are needed to prevent the government from becoming tyrannical, also known as we need guns to protect ourselves from the government: Almost 250 years and not one tyrant that needed to be or was brought down by citizens with guns. The system works folks, or it did until Citizen's United and the Lobby consortium took the power away from the people. It's not the government we need to fear or bring down, it's the corporations who think they can buy the government. And really, the largest and most advanced military in the world is not going to be brought to its knees by a bunch of untrained yahoos with guns, not even by those private self-styled 'militias'. I don't care how many guns they have. If the government wants to take your guns or take you down, it will succeed.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people: Yes, and they do it with freaking guns! If a person is determined to kill someone, they will find a way. Knife, poison, hit 'em with a car, use a baseball bat or iron skillet, yeah, people will kill. A gun takes no determination. All a gun takes is a little twitch of the finger and you don't even have to get close. If people had to get up close to kill there would probably be a whole lot less killing.

Freedom!: Sorry, your freedom will not be abridged because you can't have a fucking personal armory. No one is coming to get you unless you become a threat with your fucking armory. We live in a civilized society where, yes, bad things do happen but on the whole people go about their daily lives for their whole lives without ever needing a gun. And your right to freedom does not allow you to abridge the rights of others. We have the right not to be afraid every time we go out because of some yahoo carrying a gun.

The 2^nd amendment was written because the Founding Fathers want people to be able to rise up against the government: Wrong. That's a myth. The second amendment was written to appease the slave holding states that had their private militias to hunt down escaped slaves look it up. This gave them the authority to continue to do that (you know, the 'well regulated militia part'). Also, they recognized that many people needed their arms, which consisted of muskets and cap and ball pistols, for food and safety on the frontier. It was the Supreme Court that twisted the 2^nd Amendment into what it is today and we are reaping the results of that in thousands of deaths a year.

Liberals want to ban guns: Well, that would be nice but it's never going to happen. What liberals want is extensive background checks every time a gun is sold or re-sold, required extensive training, waiting periods, limits on the amount of ammunition that can be bought, limits on the type and quantity of guns an individual can own, insurance so that if and when you are irresponsible with your gun you will be responsible for the damage. We want you to have to show a need for that gun and we want you to keep it in your house and locked up with exceptions when you can show a need to take it out in public. And we want all that reviewed every year. Any of or all that would be great. Why should it be harder to own a car than a gun?

I'm not against guns per se. I know there are people out there who are justified in owning their gun...people who hunt, those who live out in the country and have to deal with things like venomous snakes and wild hogs, people who are isolated and any call for help would take a long response time, people in urban areas who have to be in high crime rate areas, people who transport large sums of money or other valuables, people who have a reasonable fear of assault, etc. I grew up in a time when people carried their hunting rifles on the gun rack and my father had guns that he kept locked up, I've gone skeet shooting. But this unfettered access to a ridiculous array of weaponry combined with a complete lack of mental health care and the glorification of violence (we are the most war mongering nation on the planet, have been in one war or another for nearly every year of our national existence look it up) and division and this particular national feeling of entitlement to whatever we want and want to do, because America!, has got to stop!

Right now, we don't need foreign enemies because we have lost more people to gun violence than to all the wars and terrorism. And we did it to ourselves. We've had more mass shootings than days of the year so far just this year alone and that doesn't count all the other forms of gun violence.

What the fuck is wrong with us as a nation that we do not have what it takes to do what it has to take.

failure rates and learning curves

To answer Ms Moon's question, what do I do with the ones that don't pass muster?

Well, I don't finish them for one thing. They usually go on a shelf somewhere until they get put in a box and eventually thrown away. This one will go next to another oleander failure, one that was over-fired. The last time we did one of these we had to do it twice.

This is how the turquoise bowl was supposed to turn out.

If it's a casting defect and I think I can salvage it with a little creative cold work, I'll make the effort but mostly a bad cast can't be remedied. This piece cast well but the colors didn't work out. That in itself, while disappointing, is not an immediate reason for rejection. I've sold many a small bowl whose colors didn't come out the way I envisioned. But on this one, the colors were just too extreme on the one hand, the blue, and the white did not show up adequately and was pixelated to boot and when illuminated from above nearly disappears altogether.

Failure is always a possibility with this technique and now that we are only doing one of a kind pieces, that danger is a little more present. When we were doing the small bowls, a form we had done over and over, a couple hundred times, we got so good at them that our failure rate was almost non-existent. But when we switched to a taller form, I stopped trying the 6" tall vase because after the first two that came out perfect, we couldn't seem to get one that didn't need extensive cold work. The last one we made was so perfectly cast except for the top inch and a half which was a total ruin that it made me cry.

And while most of the failures come from bad casts...over-fired and full of pits, under-fired and granular, mold cracking during firing, not holding at the casting temperature long enough...other failures come from how the mold was filled...too much glass overall, not enough glass, not enough of a color or too much of a color, mixing colors together that react badly with each other, putting a dark color behind a light color. And then there is always the mold itself which can be weak and full of bubbles if not made properly.

I know that every time I try a new form, like the boxes, I'll have a few failures so I try to ease into it. I'm trying to do things that are simpler in some ways...no more two and three part molds. Well, two part molds but easier two part molds. These days I'm doing work that can be cast in open face molds, the easiest of all.

This technique is the most difficult, time consuming, detail oriented, and sometimes frustrating thing I have ever done, and infinitely rewarding when it all works out right. It's a good thing there were two of us while we were working on our learning curve because there were many times when one of us was ready to give up. Fortunately, neither of us were ever ready to give up at the same time.