remember these?

I call this series Botanica Erotica. These are the small 4” x 4” squares.

Well, the molds have been made for some time now but what with all the g'kid visits and the couple of jobs this summer I haven't had time to finish them. Over the past three days I have filled all three molds. Not completely though. The glass in them is less than half the glass needed but we still have to make the reservoirs to hold the extra frit. The larger flower squares I modeled last fall still have yet to have their molds made. Although I made those models first, I decided to cast the three small ones first to work out my ideas, see if my plan for filling the molds, layering the colors would work out.

I don't know when they will get cast. Although the power has not cut off since that one week when it went off three times, we need to get more plaster and silica to make the reservoir part of the molds and we're waiting til later this week to head into the city.

I've started taking lots of pictures of the process of model making and filling the mold. One of the things I'm thinking about doing to relieve our income problems is write a book about our work and process. I've had several people suggest that I ought to do it. I doubt that any of the pictures I've been taking would be usable but at least it makes me think about all the steps and how I would write about what I do. I don't even know where to start so I'm going to look over books other glass artists have written about their work and process and see if I can at least work up an outline. It's a long term solution to right now income woes but I think it would bear fruit eventually.

So anyway, here's how one of the flower squares went:

The mold with the first color in place. This was actually three colors. First I put in a very pale yellow, backed it up with a light amber, and eventually added a little bit of medium amber (but not in this pic). You can see the picture above the mold that inspired this piece.

The next layer of color was a mix of translucent white and clear with black powder and a tiny bit of white stringer in the tips (which you can't see, covered with the white as it is).

Next I layered in the colors in the petals. I used three different mixes of lt. pink, dk. pink and lt. lavender with a sprinkling of fushia.

All the petals have been filled in.

Next I filled in the background with a lt. gray.

Finally I put in a layer of clear and then filled it with a courser size of clear. If this looks like a different mold, that's cause it is. I forgot to take a picture of this stage with the first one.

Once the reservoir is made and stacked on top, I will add a layer of white, more clear and then finish with white or maybe I'll do all white. The finished block should be 1” - 1 1/2” thick at it's thickest point. All the colors except for the white are transparent. Once fired, some of the colors will intensify and with all the little air bubbles that are trapped inside, the transparent colors will appear more translucent.

still more misc blog poop

Consulting my little notebook I see I have several awards and mentions to acknowledge.

Hilary over at The Smitten Image has twice graced me lately with a Post Of The Week mention, May 18 for L is for... and June 15 for Play Date (the titles are links in case you missed them). Obviously, she must not have been reading any of my excellent posts for July and August. hee hee, just kidding Hilary. Hilary is an awesome photographer so you should all go over and see the world through her eyes, or eye as the case may be.

And Linda from Blue Skies Sunny Days has recently awarded me the Liebster Blog, for blogs with fewer than 200 followers (or members as blogger calls them now). And yes, I still qualify for that. She's a fairly new reader of mine and obviously doesn't know what the rest of you have already figured out, that this is the Hotel California for blog awards (they can check in but they can never check out). She has recently left San Francisco and moved back to the part of isolated Oklahoma near where she and generations of her family grew up searching, like the rest of us at this point in our lives, for peace and tranquility and wondering why the hell she thinks she will find it in this “godforsaken state” (her words in case you couldn't figure out what the quote marks were for).

I'm supposed to recommend 5 other blogs with less than 200 'members' but when blogger introduced the new dashboard they did away with the 'manage your blogs' function that let you see at a glance which blogs you follow and how many members they have so I would have to visit every friggin' blog I read to find the appropriate ones and, well, I'm just not gonna do that. The real reason, though, is that I'm not very good at following rules. But do go visit Linda at least.

The last thing on my little agenda here is I noticed yesterday that my last post before this one marked 500 for me. And still I ramble on. That's gotta be some kind of milestone, right?

lessons

The wheel is turning towards fall though you'd never know it based on the temperature. As usual, we down here rely on other indicators that fall is nigh...the shortening days and crop harvest.

Being the born and bred city folk that we are, living out here in an agricultural community has been very interesting and educational. I'm sure the kid that hays the 13 acre field behind us thought we were crazy the first time we saw him do it, standing out there gawking while he mowed, raked and baled. Great entertainment for us and our lesson for the day.

This past weekend it was the cotton in the fields.

I think the farmer that works these fields at the end of our street must have a day job. I only ever see him out there evenings and weekends. Mostly weekends. He started harvesting the cotton Saturday evening working late into the night long after full dark.

field full of cotton (the plants are sprayed with a defoliant a week or two before harvest)

these small harvesters scoop up the cotton leaving what's left of the plant behind

when the harvester is full it disgorges it's contents into a container where it is compressed

and then ejected somehow leaving a giant bale of cotton ready to be loaded up on a truck and carted off

After all the cotton is scooped up, another device goes over the fields cutting the stalks of the plants a couple of inches above ground level. I don't know what they do with those but they weren't left on the ground.

At some point what's left will be plowed under.

And that's your lesson for the day.

One of the first years after we bought the country house but before we were living out here full time, the grandkids were with us for the weekend. It was August, the cotton had popped and driving by on our way over to my sister's house to see her and the chickens somehow we were having a conversation about slavery. Oh oh! They had learned about that in school (they were still in elementary school then).

Later in the day, I took them over to the edge of the cotton field in the middle of the hot hot sun day. Standing there on the edge of the field that went on as far as they could see, full of cotton I told them this:

That had they been a slave in this country they would never have enough to eat and would always be hungry.

That the food they did get would be the cheapest and least quality available.

That they would be barefoot and dressed in rags, clothing no one else wanted.

That they would live in a hut with a dirt floor.

That they would own nothing, not even their children.

That they would have to get up at dawn and work in the fields til dark every day of their lives.

That they would have to carry a gunney sack and pick every bit of this cotton by hand in the hot sun hour after hour and day after day and if they did not work fast enough or long enough they would get a beating.

That they might get the beating anyway.

Standing there on the edge of that field in the hot hot sun in the middle of August looking at all that cotton, I could see in their faces that right then, they got it. You could see the enormity in their eyes.

And that was their lesson for the day.

where to from here

The pecan trees started dropped their immature fruit several weeks ago, starting with the little ones 1/2” to an inch. You can tell how they are growing on the trees because the dropped pecans have been getting bigger and bigger. Now, in the last week, they are starting to be fairly good sized and the squirrels are sampling them. I'd guess that at least 70% of the green pecans on the ground now have been half eaten.

In the few years we have been out here this is the first year that I have seen so many of the pecans damaged by the squirrels. I'm not sure why that is but I tend to think it's the drought. Either they are desperate for moisture and food or all the squirrels have migrated to our yard because we provide a constant water source via the bird baths and the turtle pond. I don't begrudge them the pecans.

So now that the new cycle has begun so I have begun my morning and evening traverses of the yard. Now I pick up the immature fruit because they are hard on my bare feet and bare is my favorite footwear but later I will be picking up the ripe nuts. I hope.

I use this time to meditate, to think about stuff. Lately, I've been thinking maybe this was a mistake, moving out here. Not because we don't like it because we do.

We had discussed whether or not our business would survive with us being out here and I, ever the optimist, could see no reason why it wouldn't. We would keep our same phone number and I assured all the designers we had worked with that we were not going far and still intended to do our work. We've done plenty of jobs that were not in Houston when we lived there.

But the truth is, our business has suffered. The last year and a half jobs have been few and far between. We pare down when work is slim, we've had lean years before.

Was it our move out here, my poor to none marketing efforts (which I am trying to remedy, sort of like closing the barn door after the horse got out), the crashed economy, all of the above?

I've been wondering what I could do if I didn't do this. It's possible that, with my background, I could get a design or art related job if I was still in the city. Out here in this small economically depressed town, that's not an option. And then there's my age which would be a problem even if I was still in the city. Out here the biggest employers are Walmart, HEB and the plastics factory.

I'm used to uncertainty, have lived with it from the beginning and we always managed, even prospered at times, but then we also had our youth. We wonder, even if we had jobs lining up, how much longer we might expect to be physically able to do this work, pick up and manipulate these heavy pieces of glass, entering our 60s as we are. 10 more years? Is there 10 more years of work out there? The middle to upper middle class was my clientele, never having garnered the attention of the super rich, and they are hard hit too. And there are so many relatively inexpensive options out there now for decorative glass.

I've been thinking about changing my medium for the small art pieces I do. Glass is so expensive and time consuming and difficult to work with making the finished pieces quite costly. I've been thinking about maybe working in ceramics and incorporating pate de verre elements. We'll see. I don't know shit about ceramics so there would be a new learning curve but I've been wanting to include multi-media for a while.

Well, I have no idea what the future holds but I am trying to face each day with optimism and being open to possibilities.

close but no cigar

Can you see the rain in this picture?

I know, hard to see.

It was raining lightly while the sun was shining the whole time. We caught just the barest edge of the little rain cloud. Only lasted about 10 minutes or so. Enough rain to get the exposed areas wet but not enough to make it through even the barest canopy. Enough to kind of rinse things off a bit. I was out there calling to it, trying to persuade it to come my way but it had other plans.

Later, on my way to check on my sister's cats while she is gone (the dogs are here), I saw that they got a decent little shower in town.

Actual puddles of water still standing.

I'm trying hard not to be envious.

They need water too.

other accomplishments

In between grandchild visits we did actually do a couple of jobs.

The first one was the two 5' x 5' windows and the two door lites. This was a remodel of a garden room off the back of a two story brick Georgian that was built on a sloping lot so that the garden room was a couple of steps down from the level of the rest of the house. Back then they leveled the slab instead of raising up the lot and forcing all the drainage onto the adjacent lots like they do now. So the remodel raised up the floor of the garden room to be level with that of the house and they got all new doors and windows, repainted and freshened up the upholstery. And had us do the two windows and doors on the west side to block the view of the driveway and to soften the summer sun.

We worked on the low E insulated glass (double pane) units that the window company ordered or, rather reordered since the guy failed to order them in tempered which the building code required. Nice for us because then we weren't working on them in the frames and holding up the construction. The door lites we did work on in the doors.

These panels are done in an airbrush style instead of the usual carving we do because the tempered glass lites weren't thick enough to carve on.

The second job was a pair of door lites into the master bath from the master bedroom in a high rise. The client wanted a decorative element that provided for light and privacy.

This is the bath side and it wasn't nearly that pink.

I haven't done any casting all summer what with the kids and the jobs. I've got several molds ready but since we've had the power go off three times in the neighborhood in the last week I'm kind of hesitant to start a firing as long as these triple digit days continue.

whew

The last grand girl is gone, returned home today.  By the last visit, which always falls in August, I am getting worn and the outdoors is so hot and dry and worn.  And we have had an unusual amount of wind this summer.  Hot, dry wind.

So Robin and I spent most our time inside and mostly what we did was sew.  She had picked out a pattern that was a top and a 'skort' only she wanted the shorts and skirt separate.  Robin channels my mother sometimes.  She picked out an orange with white dots for the top and shorts and a lime green with white dots for the skirt.  Those were my mother's favorite colors and Robin picked out the exact shades.

She wanted a shoulder bag like the one her sister Jade made so Robin started with that.  Although she is 3 years younger, she is better on the sewing machine than the twins.  She can do long straight even seams.  So I do the curvy seams and the more difficult stitching and she does the straight ones.  After she made her bag and while we were working on the clothes, she entertained herself by cutting fabric into pieces and sewing them together.   

Later, together we made a stuffed toy and after that she took different colors of fabric and made little stuffed fruits and vegetables that she pinned together.

Counterclockwise from left – orange, blueberry, carrot, plum, avocado, lime

We did other things besides sew.  

We checked out all the little antique stores around the square.

We went to see the Smurf movie in 3D.  

We went down to the dried up stream bed (wasn't as much fun as we thought it would be, nothing interesting to find and it was hot).

We made ice cream (chocolate).

We helped my sister unpack a few boxes.

We made a pie (key lime again).

We played games.

She made bows and clipped them in my hair.

But she wasn't interested in swimming in the little pool.