Looking back and looking forward

Bit of a long post today, so grab a cuppa and settle in for an update!

Looking back...

I told you about my birthday, didn't I? Well, one of my presents was to go on an evening of glass working with the lovely Judith of The Creation Station. (I'd done some stained glass work - gosh! FOUR years ago! - and fancied trying my hand at making glass coasters this time)

Making glass and firing it in the kiln is very different to stained glass work; Judith explained that you can never tell 100% how a piece will turn out after firing, and that you have to learn to love bubbles in your finished work. There are many ways to make the coaster - we used bullseye glass, and you could sandwich other glass fragments, snipped rods, powders, flit or thin sheet copper between two layers of glass which, when fired in the kiln, would blend together as they melted and make the final piece.

To begin with, we practised cutting float glass. As you can see, it was a bit hit and miss as to whether I got a straight line or not!

Once I managed to do it fairly consistently, I was excited to get going on the coloured stuff - but my first problem was deciding on a colour theme. Just look at what we had to choose from...

There were so many colours - I tried to put together a rainbow, but apparently you don't get purple glass very often because it's very expensive: contains gold. So I ditched that idea and looked at shades of green, but still wasn't happy. Eventually I plumped for aqua and white, selecting a mixture of opaque and transparent fragments with the aim of cutting simple stripes.

Second problem. Could I cut the glass? Could I heck! There were a variety of different tools on offer, and I must've tried each one, but I couldn't seem to make the scratchy noise that told you you'd scored the glass well enough to snap it. I had felt reasonably confident on the float glass, but the coloured glass is slightly thicker and Judith also said that some glasses are harder to cut. (Made me feel better - could blame the glass, not my ability with the tools!) Anyway, eventually I had prepped my first coaster.

It took me so long to prep the first one, I panicked and did my second coaster in a terrible hurry. I found some iridescent glass fragments - the blue had textured ridges in it, too - and chopped them into little squares and strips and triangles.

Everyone did something different - here are all the designs laid out on kiln paper on the transporting boards.

The coasters were fired over the next few days, and returned to us. The results were not too bad at all.

Bubbles and stripes!

The striped one is my favourite - pretty square, not too many bubbles, good blend of colours. The slight wibble in the outside edge is because I wasn't too good at getting the strips to cut exactly the same length. The other is good for different reasons - it has a serious bubble issue! This makes it impossible to use as a coaster, but makes it beautifully tactile. Apparently it could have been because I used too much glue (we secured the pieces for transport with teensy dobs of PVA), or I'd not cleaned the glass properly (grease from fingers can have this effect) or it may have been just too big an air gap, that would not have happened if I'd added some chunks of clear glass in the gaps. Whatever happened, I like it! It sits by the TV and the iridescence catches the sun...

I realised two things about myself as a crafter at this session. One; I like immediate results. By which I mean that sending the coasters away to be fired and not knowing exactly how they would end up was not a pleasant feeling for me. Something to do with controlling the result, maybe? Perhaps that's why I knit or crochet or draw - you can see the piece building up, albeit slowly, and know what you're going to get at the end. Two; I'm a bit anal about patterns! I love to see random colourways and blends of patterns, but I am incapable of doing that myself and feeling comfortable about it. There has to be a certain amount of symmetry or balance in what I create...maybe that's why I wasn't entirely happy with the placement for the bubbly one.

I'd have loved a longer session, trying out the different effects you can get on coasters or jewellery pieces. Perhaps I'll try to persuade Judith to do a whole day? It'll give me a chance to get to grips with those tools and learn to cut properly.

So that's glass working. Next - the garden room. Last time I wrote about it, it was weather tight. Now, it has cladding, insulation, ventilation, and a floor. Still not completely finished - internal walls, electricity, some landscaping and finishing touches required - but it IS useable. 

We've also treated ourselves to a new patio set (the old one was about ten years or more old and very, very broken!) which goes really well colourwise with the cedar cladding on the front. Best bit of it though is that it's a collapsible table, which means it won't take up much space for storage when it's folded down, but we can have just half of it up and push it against a wall inside the garden room to give me a table for typing on. Assuming I ever get in there to write...

And then there was Mountfest. This is the annual PSA (Parents and Staff, as opposed to the more usual Parents and Teachers) Garden Party, which is one of the biggest fundraisers for Mountfields School, where I used to work and still help out as a volunteer librarian. the school. I was given the opportunity of having a table for my books, which seemed like a good idea, because the children know me through my work in the library and my love of stories already. Perhaps there'd be a few sales, though from past experience I know that people don't come to these garden parties with lots of money.

Anyway, I set up the stall (old sari bunting rather than the rainbow flags because I've obviously put my rainbow bunting somewhere really safe - I couldn't find it!) with my books and a Granny Rainbow treasure map game;

For the game, basically, Granny had lost her potions and if you chose the same square that Mr Squidge had (answer in a sealed envelope which I didn't see beforehand!) then you won a jar of rainbow sweets. If you look closely, you'll see all the pictures had something to do with a Granny Rainbow story...although as one eagle-eyed Phoebe told ma "The frog should be pink!" Put that down to colouring too late at night. There's one thing that WASN'T in a story; the squirrel is the school's logo. You can also see why I didn't illustrate the books - my violin is shocking, and apparently I draw 'angry cats'!

I only sold four books, but there were some interesting conversations with members of staff who didn't realise I wrote, and with children who'd moved on from Mountfields but still remembered Granny Rainbow. It's all about being seen, isn't it? I raised a little bit of money for the school, too, so it was all good.

So all of that's stuff which has happened. Looking forward, then...

On Friday, I will be at the launch of the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize Anthology, reading from my longlisted story 'The Pink Feather Boa Incident.' The anthology has twenty stories in it, and there are some real corkers. You can buy copies of the book here on Dahlia Publishing's site.

Then it'll be a family holiday, followed by The Kitchen. After twenty five years in this house, we are having a new kitchen! Which is all very exciting, but at the moment I'm having a minor panic because I'd set my heart on having pale grey unit doors, but all the colours we've received as samples so far are brown and way too dark...

Blog posts may be few and far between over the next month or so, but I'll do my best to keep in touch!