The trailer solo was a success! I was pretty nervous about the whole thing, but it turns out this "delicate flower" can, in fact, fend for herself. It only took about 20 micro-maneuvers to successfully back the trailer into the super narrow spaces at the
RV park in Pacifica. The guy in the giant rental RV across from me took pity on me (or maybe his self preservation instincts kicked in) and helped me back my big a** into the narrow space. The odd thing was I didn't really have too much trouble steering the trailer backwards but a lot of trepidation about clipping his RV with the truck's front bumper. Apparently, my spatial sense only extends in the direction I am actually looking.
Aside from the narrow, asphalt parking lot aspect of the park, the unobstructed view of the Pacific ocean was incredible! As soon as we got close to the ocean I had to roll the windows all the way down and breathe in the salty smell of the sea, oh how I do love and miss it!
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| view from RV park |
The other big first for me this weekend was renting time on the flameworking torch at Public Glass on my own. After checking out literally every book in the Solano County library system related to glassworking, I settled on a few good ones to use and purchase for permanent reference:
Contemporary Lampworking by Bandhu Dunham and
Flameworking by Elizabeth Mears.
The Flameworking book is set up as a primer for the beginning glass worker with a series of projects from very simple, easy shapes to progressively more difficult objects. The first exercise is to practice joining 2 glass rods together with the objective of achieving a nearly invisible join (smooth, same diameter as the original rods). Even this simple exercise held more challenge than I expected, as you can see from below. I did improve with practice (progressing from left to right).
Clearly, I could use more practice on this basic skill, but in my typical manner, having the patience of a jack rabbit on jolt juice, I immediately pressed on to the next project, making an assortment of leaf shapes.
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| pulling the flattened glass into a vague leaf shape |
I made a few attempts at this, including trying to put a loop on so they could be used as, maybe, Christmas ornaments. The loops were terrible as I completely forgot the very elegant procedure for doing this that I learned last month from
Jeff Rogers. However, this last leaf looks pretty good, if I may say so myself.
Time was passing much faster than I expected and I was quite eager to work with some of the colored
borosilicate glass recently acquired from
C.R Loo in Richmond, so I pressed ever onward into the next project in the book. Making this one last object took WAY longer than I thought, however I did get a much better feel for how the glass behaves in the flame.
The evening entertainment was a live demo of
the Blaker Desomma artist team making their signature ocean wave sculpture. I just love this picture of the glass artist guy as he triumphantly poses with the finished wave.
There was a display of some of their other completed artwork for display and sale. Really fantastic pieces depicting sea life or just beautifully abstract.
One of the more abstract pieces struck my friend, Jardee, as "Alien Dinosaur Eggs", which I had to agree is a spot on description of these things.
