Momma Goose

One of our Canadian geese is sitting on eggs in the planter box in the front patio just to the right of the breezeway. We can spy on her from our bedroom window.

Kitty Cats

I went out to the patio in the front yard yesterday to take photos of some of the flowers that popped out this spring. Bob-B and Peaches, my friendliest outdoor cats, came over to see what I was doing and promptly collapsed at my feet. Crazy cats. In the photos are (1) Peaches, (2) Bob-B, and (3) both of them.

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Mother's Day

Dennis, Mom, Geno and I went to the Descanso Junction Restaurant for a Mother's Day breakfast. It was fun and I think Mom had a good time.

Craft Fair

Saturday, Mom and I went to the Craft Fair at the Viejas Outlet Center in Alpine. We saw some interesting art and I bought a pendant for Mom for Mother's Day. She already has a lot of my jewelry, so I thought she would like something made by someone else.

Pot Melt Results

My first pot melt wasn't exactly a success. I painted the kiln shelf with 22 coats of hi-fire kiln wash, yet the pot melt glass stuck to the shelf and fractured before I even tried to lift it out.

This is the set-up for the pot-melt. The coated (pink) kiln shelf is on the bottom and the bowl with the glass in it is sitting on a riser. As the glass melts, it flows through the holes in the pot and the large hole in the riser to the kiln shelf below. You can't see it in this photo, but I used a stainless steel round ring lined with 1/8" fiber paper so the glass wouldn't stick to the ring, which it didn't.

This is the second pot melt.

This time I put thin fire paper on the bottom of the kiln and the glass didn't stick to it. The glass turned out pretty good, but the edges that butted up against the 1/8" fiber paper were rough. I tried fire polishing the glass in the kiln, but the edges were still rough. Then I slumped the plate into a dish mold, and that looked good, too, but the edges were still rough. So then I sanded the edges with the glass grinder, washed the edges with a toothbrush, sprayed the whole thing with a liquid that makes glass all shiny when you fire it, and after all that it came out pretty smooth and shiny on the edges. So this morning I put it back in the kiln to slump it again in the dish mold. That's a lot of firing and I'm hoping it won't break. I'll have to wait until tonight or tomorrow morning to find out. A firing usually takes me 24 hours because it's usually too hot to come out of the kiln by the time I go to bed. So I normally just wait 24 hrs. before I consider it done. It's teaching me patience.

Pot Melt

I'm doing a pot melt today. What is a pot melt? Well, you take a bunch of glass, put it in a pot with holes in the bottom, set in on stilts in the kiln and melt the heck out of it. Tomorrow we will see what happened in the kiln today. I'm excited and just a little worried about the glass shop blowing up. Pot melts take a very high temperature. My pot melt is conservative at 1650 degrees. Usually it takes over 1700 degrees for a pot melt. The kiln, however, does not like temperatures that high. I hope this is going to work. Photos tomorrow.

Pea Soup Friday

Our Swedish friends tell us that Thursday is the Swedish traditional day for pea soup. I don't believe we have such a traditional day in the United States, so we're having pea soup tonight, a Friday. Mom made the soup and invited us over for dinner at her house. We do have a tradition of eating dinner at Mom's on Fridays. It used to be pizza Friday, but our diets have eliminated pizza pretty much on any day. Life is hard.