Another All-Nighter

After completing a really successful glassblowing session yesterday (and, of course, dinner), I set to work customizing and linking the blog with Facebook, LinkedIn, FeedBurner and our websites; with RSS feeds, networks, etc. Convoluted and unintuitive don't quite describe it adequately enough. Found workarounds for things that didn't do what they were supposed to and finally crashed a little while after the Sun came up over the mountain tops.... again.

The blowing day was good. Some of the wine stoppers we made on Tuesday didn't survive the overnight annealing process. Looks like they may have been placed into the annealer too cold ("cold" being a relative term) and got shocked by the 975° heat. The glass color formulae were good, so we made some adjustments in our procedure and reproduced them, along with some new designs, and these all came out of the annealer today in fine condition.

I tend to make things on the large side, so my stopper tops are, shall we say, ostentatious and wonderfully extravagant. Wonderful jewelry for the back bar, having these lined up. No photography yet but we'll get some done. Gotta blow glass while the Sun shines, as it were. Our prototyping hot shop is on a sleeping porch, so the temperature is a factor. We were unable to start the furnaces since before the Holidays; it was so cold. When a cool draft encounters the hot glass, even when it is just coming out of the furnace at 2,000° F, it "skins" the surface; making it difficult to shape. We've been in 70°-75° days since the start of last weekend and this will continue until this weekend, so we're taking good advantage of it.

With my all-nighter, I'm just fragmented enough to be dangerous, so am standing down today and working on things where I won't hurt myself or anyone else. Glassblowing takes concentration; lots of it. One slip or step missed and the work may not be salvageable; nor may be your hand.

One thing that glassblowing has brought out, though, is seeing what is in front of me and, if it doesn't match what I expected, to "make lemonade". Some of these slips and lapses of concentration have produced glass designs that may not have happened except for serendipity and my acceptance of the situation and the possibilities that lay beyond. I find that I quite like it and it has opened up a whole new side of my approach.

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