Making Progress - Steel and Glass

Yesterday was another day for multi-tasking and making lots of progress. I even finished planting some of the shrubs we purchased over the weekend from a fabulous local nursery we just found.

In the studio-
Boxed up some work that will need to get shipped out today. Yay!
Cut the steel for my tile plaques (using a small Hobart plasma cutter) Then coated them all with polyurethane. Today, they should be ready to glue to the wood backings that I prepared last week.

And I was also able to continue work on my fused glass pendants. This will be the 2nd of 3 firings. For this stage, each pendant slice gets cleaned with rubbing alcohol, and then fired with a piece of dichroic glass to give it a little pizazz.

Dichroic glass (as defined by Wikipedia) is glass containing multiple micro-layers of metal oxides which give the glass dichroic optical properties. Dichroic glass was originally developed by NASA and its contractors for use in satellite optics and spacesuit visors. It's pretty cool stuff. It reflects one color, and transmits another. Very glittery! But I think too much dichroic glass can get a bit glitzy and flashy for my taste, so I use it very intentionally.

I should also mention that I fire all my glass and clay in the same L&L ceramics kiln. "They" will tell you you cant do this, but I've had very few problems and great results. There are differences in the two types of kilns, but I've been able to work out programs that allow me to do both. This is just one of the topics I'll be covering in my workshop Glass Fusing 101 at Arrowmont later this month.









Well, I'm off to work for today. I need to work on a new artist statement and updated bio. I keep putting it off. Why are artist statements so hard to write!?!?! Any tips for making it less painful?

Thanks for checking in,
Meagan
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