We have several grinders on our wet workbench. Today, I had to clean off an area. If you look closely at the clean grinder, you can see a splatter ring on the wall behind it. Earlier today that ring was over an inch thick with powdered glass that had been slung by the grinder. When I went to take a picture of it, it fell off the wall. But, having noticed it, I had to clean up. The wall didn't take too much effort, even though there was some buildup that didn't come of and I couldn't sand it away without scratching the Formica on the wall. Before I started, both grinders looked equally bad. I just had to spend two hours of scrubbing, filing, sandblasting and sanding to get the one on the right looking new. I'll get to the other one on a day where I have another two hours. There's a message here, keep things clean as you go along or spend a long time getting them clean later. Our Spring cleaning keeps on and on, but the shop is looking great!

Learning To Live With Disappointment

So..here's the cute little panel Jeanne created to see if she could use the kiln to come up with a logo design for a client.

She followed a design that they have printed on their business card.

The little vines took quite awhile to cut out.

She probably spent 2 or 3 days working on the panel.

There is a piece of moonstone glass under the colored stripes to give the panel some thickness. I fired this to 1350 last night.

And here it is, a mess!

You can see that the moonstone broke beneath the colored strips, moved everything about and even began running off the kiln shelf.

What went wrong? I probably ramped the temperature up too fast.

Back to the drawing board...They say that fused artists learn to live with disappointment.