Friday, May 22, 2009

Time keeps ticking


Here's my find for the day so far..


hey if you follow a link and find something you buy...
Let me know... please??

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Sorry nothing new today I just feel cruddy

and the Dr wasn't much help. It's allergies, but I am supposedly not allergic to anything... my symptoms aren't my normal allergy symptoms. Trust me it's allergies here we want you to take this and this, snort this and you can take one of these at night to numb the throat which we think is causing the cough.

Well it's quarter to midnight and here I am. Throat feels numb but I am still racked with cough.. and I again sent home a Project without pictures. I swear I am doing photo's tomorrow so that I can't make that mistake again!!

Gotta call the gal to come get it too


Bless you..

Hope none of the germs stick to you

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

what was I looking for originlly???

I found this and lost quite a few minutes in drooldomvill. This is a totally awesome blog I found with some really unusual jewerly on it. Alligator skin cuffs, micro mosaic's and well as the run of the mill (not) gold and silver and they say you can submit your peices with discriptions to them for review

http://justjewelry.blogspot.com/search/label/Jewelry

Bead Star contest

check out what's been done.. Vote on your fav's. :)

if you wanna chat about anything.. I know I saw one or two unusual ones....

http://beadingdaily.com/beadstar/

Monday, May 18, 2009

Excuses, Reasons and other delays...

Everyone's got Excuses or Reasons or just plain old fibber maghee's about why they haven't accomplished something. Some are better than others. Some practice more than others. Do you make excuses? Have reasons? or better yet fib to yourself and others??


Me?? I am excuses and then there's a few reasons. Then I just change subjects..


I haven't gotten much done in the last week. Allergies/cold went to my chest and if I don't have a headache from coughing I feel like the dogs ran all over me.. Which gave me the excuse of being able to explore some online garage sales, tutorial sites which was all under the thought that I was looking around to make plans, research and investigate. During my play I found this awesome site that take children's story books and turns them into notebooks. What a fantastic gift for yourself to help you wind down yet keep your ideas and thoughts in order!!


no I don't get a cut if you go buy them, but hey wouldn't object to one being bought for me. I kind of want the old mother goose with the checkerboard edge or maybe one of the pictures of there. I remember there being totally awesome pictures in that book. LOL







Doing a bit of garage saleing this week I also bought some beautiful beads called Bamboo Agate from a gal I know. This is truely stunning and so unusual I wish I could find more of these but in my search I have found that I got amazingly lucky cause most of what I found isn't as nice as this. It's the most amazing feeling stuff. I don't know what there is about it but I just wanted to keep rubbing it over and over in my hands.


The one that got away?? Fossilized Coral. Once more I looked and look and haven't found any as nice as what she had.

I am going to share photo's so you too can drool and sigh with envy and go on "Treasure Hunts" of your own!! If I ever get something made. . WOO HOO I'll post it here to.

Monday, May 11, 2009

OCR another thought process

Oh reading looking for answers to my kiln question I found this question in their http://www.glasscolor.com/community/conference_call_1.aspx page

Now I want to know if anyones done it.. Sound pretty exciting though

Question:
Could you tell us about the photosensitive Gold Ruby (G-221)?
Answer: Well, we're actually particularly proud of introducing the photosensitive Gold Ruby. And we're kind of surprised that nobody has grabbed the ball and run with it. We are kind of expecting that somebody eventually will do that. It's one of the first really new things that's come along in glassblowing in the last 400 years. And, amazingly enough, it's been invented by Americans, and we've really done nothing much but take the knowledge that's been produced in America and make it available to the studio glass scene. The key to the whole thing is having the correct lamp. Unless you have the correct lamp with the right wave length of light, then you're not going to have any success with it. Other than that, it's a fairly simple process. It's actually no different to a gold ruby, except that you blow it - when you blow it, it goes completely clear. When you get it, it's a clear rod. And it requires irradiation by UV light of the correct wave length. And then it requires a heat up to annealing temperature again for the image to become apparent. The color rod needs to be completely covered from UV light until it is ready to be used. You can use anything that blocks UV light. Keep it in the tube at all times. Where you're blocking the light, the glass will remain clear. Or it may, if the clear is overlaid on an opal background or some other color background, that color will remain the same. But where it's exposed to UV light and then heated, that becomes a gold ruby. And you can get extremely fine detail. You think of it like a film. It's literally film stock, but it happens to be a glass rod. You treat it just like any other rod, except you've got to keep it in the dark. But, you know, it's not so sensitive as film that you can't take it out of its wrapping and chop a bit off and blow it and put it in the color box. But the next day it needs to be kept in the dark until you're ready to put your design on it. And wherever you stop the UV, then nothing will happen. And wherever the UV is allowed to get through, then you've then created a lightened image there, which you will only see when you develop those. And developing it doesn't involve a whole bunch of chemicals like film. It just simply consists of getting it hot, as in 900 Fahrenheit roughly. It has to be heated evenly as well. If it's not exposed evenly, and if it's not heated evenly, then the tella development will not be even either. What we recommend is that people start off modestly. One of the most spectacular ways to see it work is doing like Italian cup work, where you've got a garriage. And you blow your cup on day one. Take it out of the annealler the next morning. Decorate it in whatever fashion you like. Expose it to UV light. Then stick it in the garriage. And you'll start to see it just go off in the garriage when you're ready to stick your cup on your stem. And when you go to the glory hole, it's just boomph! the image just happens almost instantly. It's really spectacular. That's kind of the coolest way to figure out how to get it to work, rather than making big pieces, and opening and shutting kiln doors waiting to see if it goes off. It's just such a quick, instantaneous, fabulous way of seeing how it works. But there's a whole work sheet on this, as you know. Where people can read all of the detail that they need to get it to work. You can find that on the website. Essentailly , when OCR receives the rods it is completely covered and taped. You don't have to be that paranoid about it . You can take it out of the wrapper. Don't do it under bright sunlight. But the sort of light that is in an average room is not going to hurt it for just a few seconds. If you break it off, the same amount as you'd break off if you were using a gold ruby, stick it in your hot box or your toaster, whatever, and just treat it like any other rod. It's just that if you leave it lying around, after a few days, you've spoiled it. And what that means is that it's lost its photosensitivity. It's just become an ordinary gold ruby. So it's not like you've done your money totally. It doesn't look like a gold ruby. It's still clear. But the moment you heat it up, it'll turn into a ruby.

Example http://www.glasscolor.com/products/default.aspx?cID=26&pID=141

Olympic Color Rods Iris Colors

I have a bunch of OCR iris frits. :) I of course have used them on "beads' and I understand how they work hot cold hot kiln. :)

BUT I really wanted to be able to use them for fusing. So today I called OCR and asked ???

I was told that they could be used in kiln work. You'd take it up to 13/1400 flash cool down to 11ish and then hit it with a flash of heat from the torch. NOW the question is, has anyone tried it, with what results?? Am I brave enough to try it??

Well first off I will tell you that I need to get a set of gloves so I don't burn the heck out of my hands. Second off. Um... Let see what happens after we get some gloves K??? LOL

Hope everyone's Mother's Day was as nice as mine. Lovely BBQ steak dinner and a sweet poem to Mom from my youngest Matthew. Who has a Mom that "wishes books were free and wonder's WHY he has to eat hot lunches every day."

Friday, May 8, 2009

Kiln Projects

Ok I had an adult education for fusing like 100 or less. I have been trying to get their projects cooked since last week. I have gotten 4 done out of 9. Unfortunately I pulled one out of the kiln too quick and of course it broken right across the middle. No way to hide it or fix it easily. Then after I missed the work top and dropped the bottom on the floor, no need to fix it any more. Really upsets me cause it was a great looking project and now we ( student and I) are going to have to redo it. I am taking MUCH more care with the rest and not trying to hurry through them now... I should know by now (43 years mind you) that every time I try to rush things I screw them up!! LOL

I have been playing with the temp to melt them at, trying to get it to the inbetween melt stage, you know where it's melted into the bottom glass, but still has some 3-D effect to it. One projects I did 2 times trying to get it and it was still so underdone I hyped the temp up way to far getting "impatient" of course and melted it in to one nice flat peice. Next one I hiked down a bit more.. etc.. I will see if I can remember to keep track of the schedule (yes yes I know every project is supposed to have it's own sheet telling us what we did and how so we can recreate them..) I think what I'll do is take a picture of each peice to put with the notes when I make them so that I have a visual idea of what that temp does..

So far by the way I am only using Bullseye. I have some Uroboros 96 and Spectrum 96 but haven't used them yet..

I am getting ready to start messing around with the theory that can be used on beads. I think its 55 or less of another COE. So I guess I'll start looking at trying to post these experiements got or bad right? LOL

Life, death and the pursuit of crazyness

Someone told me I needed to get a blog and so I did.. I guess. I am not sure what I will do with it though. My thought is that I play and dabble as a beginner on so many things that I would start to keep track of books bought for crafts, what I thought of them, new things I bought, new things I tried and maybe even some of the stuff I have finished.

Anyone that knows me knows that I go through times of doing nothing to times of doing everything and on top of that I try to be the "soccer" mom and registrar for one kid, the stick beating the oldest into graduating and the youngest to figure out that there's more to life than thinking you want to join the army at 5. So Let's see how this goes...