Let’s start with the good. Spring is here. The flowering trees and shrubs are magnificent this year. Tulips abound and my irises are starting to bud. The days are longer, the sun’s been shining, the air has been full of the intoxicating scents of spring. There have been lovely evenings, all perfect for nice, long walks down in the Tanner Park gully with my dog.
The bad…. spring is here. The grass is growing, quickly. The weeds are sprouting everywhere. I am an fairly avid gardener, most all of the perimeter of my yard is perenial flower beds. I have gardens around my house and small a pond. When spring comes, I find myself with a lot of yard work, the worst job of which is to dig out the grass that is invading all my flower beds. Our soil is very clay-ee, so any kind of weeding is hard work; I always joke that we need to get out jack hammer out when it is time to weed. But I’m digressing from the point of this post. While I’d be happier with less weeding, I enjoy working in my yard, but it takes up a very considerable amount time in the spring, and because of this my available torch time has really suffered.
The ugly… it’s bad enough that my torch time has been lacking, but it also seems like the glass gods have not been shining upon me. I brought some new silver leaf and foil recently. File that under “good”, as I love working with silver. Unfortunately, I’ve not been happy with my silver results. I’ve been using a lot of rubino (gold pink) glass with my silver, and while working in the flame my beads seem most delicious, nice pinkish orangish colors with blue hues in places where it reacts with silver. Because these beads looked so beautiful I spent a large chunk of my spring limited torch time make silver/rubino beads. I was quite sure I was on to a great new design. The ugly came when I opened the kiln. For the most part, all those beautiful colors had a changed to shades of brown, and even worse, kind of a baby poo brown. There were a few glimmers of those pinkish oranges that I expected, but not many. My beads were mostly earth toned and while I like earth tones, that simply wasn’t what I wanted from these beads. Clearly there is something about my kiln environment that doesn’t favor my pretty colors. I wish I new what it was or how to change it. Any ideas? I would love my beads to come out just as beautiful as they went in. Maybe it’s time for a sacrifice to the glass gods!
mallory says:
This is just like the birth of spring. Not all days are warm. Not all days are cool. This is just like beads. Some days the colors are beautiful. Other days, the colors are poo. Your beads are not poo. I like them.
May 12th, 2009 at 8:46 pm