I thought we got out for an early walk, but it was pretty hot by the time we got to the dog park. Maisy ended up with 3 other dogs to play with and we ended up with a 2 mile walk. I ran Joel to the ortho and then got back home in time for lunch. The girls were knee deep in books, Nancy Drew is quite popular right now.
This afternoon we had a class at the library, fused glass. The artist that was helping has a studio in Elizabeth, about 50 miles away, so he came a long way to do this class. He showed us the different types of glass in every color you could imagine.
He told us how to take a blank and using a tiny amount of glue, attach varying colors and pieces to the blank. We could make a pendant, key-chain, stone (like a paper weight) or brooch. Bethany and Grace chose key-chain, Hannah and I chose pendant.
We chose our blank and colors of glass and sat down to work.
It was hard work placing those tiny glass pieces together.
The artist will take them back to his studio to fire. Did you know that glass (without any defects) is 100 times stronger than steel? In fact, they now use glass balls covered in rubber to get samples from miles deep in the ocean because the steel tubes they were using were collapsing. The last thing we had to choose was whether we wanted the piece to be full or tack fuse.
Full fuse goes in the kiln at 1200 degrees for 22 min or 1500 degrees for 2 min and creates a smooth surface.
Tack fuse goes in the 1200 degree heat for 2 minutes and comes out bumpy. We all chose tack for our pieces.
I’m excited to see how they turn out, we’ll get them back July 19th.
