Many ways to make Murrine cane!

I recently got to attend a free demo by Lucie Kornakova and it was so inspiring!
(photo from Lunacy on Etsy)

I've been making my gathers football-shaped, Japanese-style and trying to stretch my graduated stripes evenly on the narrowing ends. It works fine for basic twist and ribbon cames but the more stripes and details, the more distorted the ends become. I also used small 1/8" metal punties, which again work fine for small simple things but are too flimsy for larger pattern canes.



Lucy builds hers in a narrow cylinder, even diameter so you can just stripe on even lines. She then builds up waste clear glass in either end to make the "egg" for pulling down with 10mm boro punties. I'd heard of that before but always thought that it would be so wasteful. Now I see how much sense it makes. No worries about boro contamination because it's only embedded in the waste glass, which is then discarded. She also talked about making murrine components and combining them together, which I'd only done an uber-tiny bit before.


(photo from Lunacy blog)


Lucy also had the most heat-efficient approach I've ever seen on a torch - it took her no time to melt huge gathers. I think this was partly because of the sweet Nortel Max torch and the world-class set-up at The Glass Shoppe Studio, but partly because she was able to absorb heat into her working pieces efficiently while keeping the finished base layers hard.

There was a class afterwards but we don't have the budget for it right now, sadly. Still just from the demo I've got a lot more ideas now!

I also got a link from my jewellery-designer friend Susan in Winnipeg showing U.S. artist Jim Jones' completely different approach to murrine cane building using sheet glass and a kiln. Very unique!


(photo from Glass2wear.com)

So far my most complex canes are my floral stamens. That's probably where I'll focus my new ideas. Now I just need some more fuel... ;)

Thanks For a Great First Show, Ottawa!

It's been over a week since the OGBA show! We were pretty tired by the end (not too tired to go straight out to a party afterwards, of course!) but it was a big success for us and Andrea and I both feel pretty great about the experience.

There were some pretty amazing artists involved in the show and I was really nervous! But everyone was so nice, and we had a good response from visitors. We even re-imagined out display a little, using the bronze-coloured drapery instead of the yellow-gold damask. I like the subdued colour better.

Our approach to display is always evolving but there are a few elements that I highly recommend: light, height and levels. To raise the table to hip height, we use 4 pieces of black ABS pipe about 18 inches long, and just fit one over each of the folding buffet table legs. It's dead simple and makes it so much easier to see our tiny work. For our levels, we use two of our transport containers (plastic suitcases) and lay a melamine shelf across them, before draping everything in fabric. It not only adds visibility and visual interest, but it gives us a hidden "cave" under the middle of the shelf where we can store packaging materials for easy access!

We bought some new glass and frit from Nortel and the Glass Shoppe that I'm looking forward to playing with. We don't have any more shows planned for the rest of the year, but we look forward to our next one, whenever it may be!

Post 100 - OGBA Show This Friday & Saturday!

My 100th blog post!!!

(Fireworks, fireworks, flag raised on castle)



Today, the OGBA show begins! (Ottawa Glass Bead Artists, not the Ontario Goat Breeders Association).

OGBA Bead & Jewellery Show 2010
Friday November 12th, 4-9pm
& Saturday November 13th, 10-6pm 2010
* A Showcase of ‘Hand Made’ Glass Beads , Jewellery & Bead Work *
Venue: Hellenic Centre, 1315 Prince of Wales Drive
Ottawa, Ontario


Andrea and I have been working hard and are proud of the new work that we have for this event. We moved the kiln onto the giant metal work table so that it would be easier to make off-mandrel work, and I made a great series of leaves and calla lilies. I really like the new workbench layout! It's ridiculously convenient.



Andrea has created a fresh batch of Captive Drop earrings and I'm very excited to see how they're received by the Ottawa community.



Other than the earrings, all of our new work is being offered as loose beads or pendants because many show attendees will be jewellery designers. However we're bringing a kit of wire-wrapping tools and sterling components so we can create custom finished jewellery for buyers as requested.

Wish us luck!

99th post: Florals Galore!

We have five brand new, Ottawa-made florals that will be available at the OGBA show this Friday and Saturday!


This one has a twist: I added some small cane-florals around the main stamened florals. It added a lot of time to the creation but I like the effect! I'm also happy with the enamelled base.



This one is sweet, little and bright. I accidentally made it on a 1/16" mandrel, which was nervewracking at the time (it's very delicate mandrel for a focal!) but luckily it worked out. It's a benefit now, as a smaller hole diminishes the hideous spectre of bead-wobble. The vivid green, coral and pale pink palette isn't one of my typical colour combinations but I'd like to explore it more! I actually did make a matching earring pair that Andrea is making into Captive Drop earrings.


This one was the first floral I made in the new studio! It features my trusty black base and handpulled reactive cane base, with stamened flowers in white.



I love the background on this one! So rich and vivid. Blue does such wonderful things in glass. I'll never get tired of playing with blues.


This was the most recent one I've made, and also the biggest of the batch! I'm really happy with it. It has a rich background with frit, silver foil, reactive cane and goldstone, two huge violet florals with nicely flared stamens, and four smaller complex cane-flowers. It's something that one can gaze into and enjoy the depths and detail.

I can't believe I'm almost at post #100! Thanks to everyone who has been reading my blog. :) It's nice to have a place to talk through projects, track progress and generally nerd out on glass. :)

Show preparations!

We're getting geared up for the Ottawa Glass Bead Artist show coming up Friday November 12th, 4-9pm & Saturday November 13th, 10-6pm 2010 at the Hellenic Centre (1315 Prince of Wales Drive). Since we got behind in preparing our studio we've been at the torch pretty much constantly all week!

At first it felt weird and I was mostly making "safe", process beads, just getting used to the feel of glass and fire again. It has been six months since we packed up our studio! But over the course of the week the groove started to come back and by the middle of the weekend I was feeling the love!



I've been having fun in a few designs with "threading" - heating the tip of a rod, then, outside of the flame, making a tiny anchor on the bead and quickly stretching and spinning a tiny thread of glass around the bead until the glass cools and snaps off. Repeat as necessary.

We also realized that we were out of business cards! I've attempted to design interesting business cards for us in the past but it's always ended up over-crowded and boxy. This time Andrea had some concrete examples of business cards from other artists that she'd been collecting. I worked from there and experimented with a split and angled design. I'm pretty excited about it - I think it's a breakthrough.



I'll have to write a phone number for people who don't have internet (raise your hand if that's you!) but that's what the plain back is for.

Stay tuned for photos of my first batch of Ottawa-made florals coming up next!!!

New Studio, first incarnation...

In real life, it took a lot longer to get the studio going than it did when I imagined it in my head. Stupid real life!

It has been a productive month-and-a-bit since my last post. I was interviewed about Alaska's story (which hopefully was helpful to people going through the same situation, and/or to the Humane Society in terms of recruiting new donors and volunteers!). I also had to take her back to the vet for antibiotics for a nasty kennel cough she picked up (another side-effect of the overcrowded situation in the current shelter, which the new shelter will be designed to help prevent). I'm happy to report that she's fully recovered now and back to her old self 100%!

We also painted most of the first and second floor, which took forever, and unpacked and organized most of our stuff. Finally, once all that was under control, we were able to turn our attention to the studio.



I found a huge steel worktable on Kijiji near our house and spent an evening with Andrea trekking it home down the sidewalk on a dolly. (Clangy!) After that, my first goal was ventilation. I found a 715 CFM kitchen vent on Kijiji and after an epic quest to far Nepean, returned home with it. It was huge but covered in a thin film of sticky grease that took two hours of scrubbing to remove. It cleaned up nicely though and I'm kind of in love with it! It's a Japanese model called Sakura and the centres of the two fan grilles are shaped like cherry blossoms (which is what sakura means). Cutest fan ever.

My father spent a Sunday with me finding parts at Home Depot and installing it. It's wonderful to have a father who, at a moment's notice, can drop by with exactly the right kind of machine screws and driver bit for a job! The window was a slider and the vent duct and cover fit perfectly. We fed it through blue styrofoam sandwiched between two layers of plywood, which we custom-fit to the window hole. I painted the outer layer for protection. It's snug as a bug and looks sleek. And of course it really sucks.

We've decided to take a break on pursuing a natural gas line for now, as the red tape for that in Ontario is unbelievable. At first I thought I'd try the disposable tank and Hot Head approach, just until the show (two weeks away at the time). I bought a new Hot Head as my old FireWerks QuietTorch was dying. We made it work for a week but it was way too frustrating. The flame is so much more bushy, reducing and weak than the oxy-fuel torch. It was like trying to paint with a plastic brush when you're used to a fine-tipped sable! Of course a true artist can adapt to any tool but we were on a timeline, and I'm out of practice being an artist of any kind!



So Andrea took up the challenge and spent two days tracking down parts and connectors to get our big torch running. It's SO much nicer. Thankfully the oxygen concentrators seem to have survived the move - keep on trucking, little guys!

I also want to point out that most of my tools are hanging off rare-earth magnets from the vent! It's working out well so far.



We have the kiln and controlled going again and our old glass storage back in action. (Still being unpacked from their bubble-wrappy shrouds in the photo).

So many things we want to upgrade... (Including, you guessed it, insulating and drywalling the gloomy walls!) But for now, we are making glass again!

Reunited: A Heartwarming Tale!

I usually try to keep this blog glass-focused, but this is a really amazing story that happened to Andrea and I. It starts off really sad, though!

When we moved in to our summer sublet in June, we reclaimed our cat Alaska who had been living with my parents while we settled in. She HATED the noisy downtown apartment and cried constantly. Her restlessness led us to choose to take off her collar because the constant jangling was preventing us from sleeping, and the info was all for Winnipeg anyway. We'd tried to get her a new ID tag at the pet store and had been told we needed to go to City Hall for a license, which we intended to do the next week. After Alaska's first week with us, though, we woke up to find that she was missing, and that a corner of the decrepit screen in our second floor window had been pushed open. She must have squeezed onto the ledge, jumped to another ledge, and leaped down onto the dumpster and away into the night.



We immediately combed the bushes and alleyways looking for her, put up posters, and checked the shelters. No luck. The next day was the Ottawa earthquake, which didn't help, but we kept looking. After that they ripped up the pavement in front of the apartment. But we kept looking. We posted ads online, and enlisted everyone we knew to keep an eye out for her. We called for her in the streets and went to the shelter every three days, hoping that someone would bring her in.

Weeks passed, then months with no news, good or bad. We stopped calling in the streets but kept up our visits to the shelter, although we started to suspect that some sweet but internet-illiterate old lady had adopted her and was spoiling her with cat treats in a highrise somewhere. We hoped that was the case, because our baby was not a great hunter (she killed mice, but only by *accident*, and I don't think eating them even occured to her) and certainly not a great fighter. She had even been declawed on the front before we adopted her. We didn't think she would survive more than two weeks on the street.

At the end of August our sublet expired and we moved in with a friend for the next two and a half weeks until our house was ready. The route from work to her house took us past the shelter, so we kept checking. On Sept 10 we got possession of our house and spent a week refinishing the floors. After that we'd be in Vanier, and the shelter would be hard to get to (a 40-minute bike ride...).

On Monday the 13th I got an email from someone who had seen a white female cat at the shelter. I was able to make it in on Tuesday and there was indeed a female cat that looked painfully like our Alaska. Something about her face wasn't quite right though, and her eyes were the wrong shade. Still, I had the shelter staff check her front toes to be sure. She had claws, so she wasn't Alaska. Heartbroken, I left - around 5:45 or 6pm.

You need to check the shelter every three days to find your lost animal. That's how long they'll hold lost beasts before evaluating them for adoption, fostering, or euthanasia. You're supposed to post a lost notice at the shelter but the staff really don't have the resources to check, because so many cats come in every day. We'd tried very hard to be diligent, but we'd have a few gaps of 5 days during the transitions. Still, between Andrea, my mother and I we'd gone approximately 25 times to the shelter from June 22nd to September. Friday September 17th was my last bike ride from work to my friend's house, and it was going to be my last check in at the shelter.

It felt like a regular Humane Society shelter visit - the smell of disinfectant, the staff in scrubs, the usual police offers bringing in stray beasts, other teary-eyed petowners looking for their lost ones, and the squeaks of lonely animals. I signed into our lost cat report visit page (in the margins, because we'd already filled all the lines), checked the DOA list, checked the first wall of new arrival cages in the entryway. Each cage has a kitty litter box, food bowls, a floor mat and a little cardboard cat-cave. Usually one cat alone, sometimes siblings snuggled together or a mass of peeping kittens. You're not allowed to touch the cats because it might spread kennel cough.

There are two holding rooms of cages at the shelter, plus the entry-way and the overflow cages in the hallway. I checked the far room first, and found a flatter-faced white cat, definitely not Alaska. The hallway kitties weren't her. At least it's easy to check for a white cat...

The room closer to the entry had the door closed and a sign up about special hygiene measures to be taken. I asked the staff whether I was allowed to go in, and I must have gotten a volunteer first because she said she didn't think so, and I almost left. Luckily another staff member came along and said I could go in. I opened the door, stepped in the room and looked to my right - straight into Alaska's eyes.

I recognized her instantly, even though she was filthy, skinny and matted. I'm not sure whether I stepped forward or back - maybe both - but I know I started to cry. It had been 87 days since she ran away. I think I chirped at her and called to her through the cage door and she responded weakly. I knew it was her but I could hardly believe it. My eyes ran across her chart - "white female DMH, declawed (front), found downtown Sept 14". Finally I got the room door open again and called semi-coherently to a staff member "It's my cat...".

A staff person opened the cage door and said "Touch her.". I patted her skinny side and felt all her ribs through her long, greasy fur. She pushed her body against my hand. Then I had to leave her and do the paperwork to take her home. I paid for the vet treatment she received, the days at the shelter, a license and a microchip. They loaned me a carrier and gave me the number for the pet taxi (I left my bike there). I got some more of the story, too. Alaska had been brought in by someone who found her trapped in an underground garage at Cooper and Lyon - only a few blocks from where we'd been staying. She was brought in on Tuesday, just a half-hour after I'd left from my previous visit.

We were staying two more nights at our friend's house while the floor varnish cured. I called Andrea (who was in Vanier, in the middle of varnishing) and, still in tears, told her the unbelievable good news. The poor girl had to finish varnishing before she could do the 45 minute bike back to our friend's.

Our friend Lisa was incredible. She said of course I could bring my cat to her place. She fosters cats regularly for the Humane Society and had some tins of special recovery food which she gave to us. We spent most of Friday night snuggling with Alaska and most of Saturday trying to clean her up. On Sunday Lisa drive us home, all together.

It's been so amazing to have Alaska back. We'd dreamed about reuniting in time to move into our new house and it actually happened. It's hard to see her so weak and skinny, but she cleaned up nicely and has been recovering like a champ. She eats constantly and has been using her litter with no problems. I took her to our local vet for a follow-up and, other than mild anemia and a slightly raised white-blood cell count (within tolerances and completely expected considering her ordeal), she was given a clean bill of health - no parasites, no viruses, no organ damage, no injuries. She probably weighed under 5 pounds when she was brought in and she's 7 pounds now, which is at the low end of normal. She had to have the mats shaved off of her belly so she's still a bit naked but she's looking more normal every day. She's still resting a lot and not interested in playing yet but we're hoping that will come in time. She is snuggling, though!



She is only eight years old so we hope to have another 8 years with her. Not sure how many lives she lost this summer, but we'll appreciate every year we do have because every moment we have with her is a gift.

The lessons I take away from this experience are:

-never underestimate a stressed cat's ability to escape.
-even wussy cats are amazing survivors (maybe even better survivors than aggressive cats!)
-it may take 3 months for your lost cat to look crappy enough for someone to bring it in. I have heard this from many people. Don't give up!!!
-If you see a lost cat, at least call the shelter. They can check the lost listings. Also check Craigslist, Kijiji, UsedOttawa and other online listings.
-the Humane Society really does need more space. You can donate to their capital fund for the new space here: HS "Breaking Ground" fund
-the shelter desperately needs more animal fosterers like my awesome friend Lisa. It is a really sweet deal where you get to play with kittens, save them from weeks in a cage, and everything is paid for!