A Little Video

Glass Eyes

The Glass Eye Maker from Tomas Leach on Vimeo.

Glass eyes... I have always been intrigued. They are amazing, hard to recognize and rarely talked about. A friend in grade school had a little brother with a glass eye (he was born with a birth defect)... my mother had a friend as a child that had a glass eye (he had punctured his eye with a stick)... Did you know Sammy Davis Jr. had a glass eye (he lost his left eye in a car accident). There is always a story behind the loss of an eye, perhaps its the legend that comes with the prosthetic that intrigues me, perhaps its sheer curiosity. Honestly though, I am a glass artist and particularly obsessed with the process of crafting glass, so its the object itself that really catches my attention. Handmade glass eyes - Ocular prosthesis - Venetians began making them in the 16th century but they were fragile and uncomfortable. Later Germany became the source of higher quality glass eyes and the US stopped importing them during WWII. The glass materials were also made in Germany so American makers of prosthetic eyes started using acrylics. Now they are made out of all sorts of materials, I guess we just call them "Glass Eyes", sounds better than "artificial eye". I found this video on Etsy about a London based glass eye maker.

36 Tiny Terrariums

These little tiny terrariums simply make me swoon. I love their every detail. Pictures were taken and I didn't even edit them, I just made the collection of photos into a little video to share and remember... I know they will all find good homes.

New Display Concept

I've been working on a new display idea... I painted some simple embroidery hoops (inexpensive round wooden frames) with glossy red acrylic paint and hung them on metal hooks, the idea being that I can suspend a mobile inside the red circle and make a cluster of these circles...

I figure I'll make one circle that has a sign and this will make the cluster a retail display. For now it just looks like a neat installation.

Crafting Crafty Ladies

This video is from 2008 - but its great! Check it out the OPB show Oregon Art Beat did a segment about how crafty Portland is, featuring Crafty Wonderland, the DIY Lounge and Queen Bee

Holiday Artisans Market in Pioneer Place

Wow its really cold outside and there are a handful of vendors from the Portland Saturday Market that set up shop in Pioneer Place Downtown during this whole week - its called the Holiday Artisans Market - and its a great way for downtown shoppers to get a bunch of handmade gifts. But lets be serious - its friggin' cold outside! Fortunately its sunny now, but its not even 20degrees outside. This morning before the sun rose some TV camera crews came down and filmed live TV. My friend Jan volunteered for the super AM gig and I had to share here: (Jan you did great - I found this very funny!)



I am home and warm today, doing some shipping and preparing for next weekend - I'm prepping for Crafty Wonderland now!! I do hope my friends down at the Holiday Artisans Market are doing great business and staying reasonably warm.

Calder Le Cirque

One of my favorite things about the Calder exhibit at the Seattle Museum of Art was the video running of his circus. I found these videos on YouTube to share here on my blog.



Calder started performing his circus while living in Paris around 1930. I read somewhere that he took apart an old sculpture made of wood planks and made a set of bleachers for his friends to sit on. These friends included the likes of famous artists and philosophers like Joan Miró, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. The "circus" was a series of wire figures that cranks and strings enabled them perform different amusing acts. I love the whimsy and silliness - the peanut poops are hilarious!

There are around 200 of these different figures and Calder would fit them into 2 or 3 suitcases to take them across the Atlantic when he traveled from the US to France. I love the idea that this circus was the way he entertained his friends! Fortunately some of these friends took videos and pictures of his performances. Calder's circus figures now reside at the Whitney Museum in NY and they are now far too old and delicate to still perform, so these videos are the only way we can see them move.

I can only imagine how much time Calder must have spent playing around making these gadgets - what fun!

Repetitive Circle Cutting

This is for Michelle - you asked for it! :)

I post so many pictures of all my circle cutting... my friend Shoozles on Etsy asked to see a video... so here it is. My apologies - its a bit boring (but I sped it up so the video is about 5min)



this video is not a tutorial - my technique is my own and I take no responsibility for people hurting themselves doing silly things - kids don't try this at home :)

Cardboard Wire Cutting Jig

I cut a lot of steel wire... I have stencils for the lengths that I need for different designs... but I needed a jig to really make the job easy. I pay my friend Aimee to cut the little bitty steel wires for my mini mobiles, so I thought she deserved a jig as well! Too many wires, its maddening, a jig was sooo very necessary!
This is what I did: I took a sturdy cardboard tube and cut slots 1/3 of the way thru the tube (with a hand held wood cutter) and then I cut a scrap of sheet metal (okay so I happened to have scrap sheet metal laying around and the cool wacky scissors that are used to cut the stuff) I traced the tube onto the scrap of sheet metal so I could get the right curve and then folded over the other end so I could handle it safely. Basically the idea was to create a metal "stop" so wire could be shoved in the tube and always stop at the same length.

I like this so much! Its very efficient to cut a lot of wires at once. There's a bit of variance with the longer wires (the wire catches on the cardboard) but I love it none-the-less!

Pictured is the smaller jig I made for the mini mobiles... then I also took a video of the larger jig

the video is a little odd and it doesn't show how excited I am about this... honestly, ask Aimee - I was showing it off last week when she was at the studio. Its very exciting stuff in my world!

Better Portland and Me!

Tomorrow at 1pm on FOX channel 12 here in Portland I will be on TV. Or that is, sometime between 1 and 2pm. I filmed with the crew from Better Portland a few weeks ago... we talked about my business at the Portland Saturday Market and they filmed a little glass torchworking. I made the host Brooke a ring.

The segment will air tomorrow... I'll try and catch some video of it... maybe they'll put it on their website

New Portland Saturday Market Site

I took a few videos yesterday at the Portland Saturday Market to show off the new site, it was early morning and the crowds were not thick yet, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to walk around video-taping... I think next weekend I'll try again with the camera strapped to something rolling (like a baby stroller?) so that the video quality is a little bit better... but this give you a small glimpse into the beautiful new waterfront site

This past weekend was beautiful and exhausting. It was wonderful to see so many happy families spoiling their mothers and the sun glittering in the nearly cloudless sky. I am always thankful to meet other people that love mobiles and add to their collections. I hope they know how thankful I am that they help support my little business... THANK YOU!

My set-up has gotten more complicated... I have a bigger booth now, so I can fit more displays... and I am doing torchworking demonstrations again, so that entails setting up a mini glass studio... With all these additions to my booth its now taking me at least 2 hours to set-up and another 2 hours to take down each day. Whew! And my storage is an extra block away now, which seems trivial, but man oh man does it make it even more exhausting taking all those trips back and forth. Not that I am complaining - I am more just stating the obvious that my little feet hurt from endless trips back and forth. I am so so very appreciative that Tim helps me in the morning on Saturday and Tony helps me at night on Sunday. As it was my feet felt so humble and sore last night. I soaked them in salt in one of those vibrating foot baths last night, that helped too :)

Thai Massage in Portland Oregon

This week I exchanged massage with a LMT here in Portland who specializes in traditional Thai massage. It was heaven! This is a short video of her working, check it out:

I found this video on her website and I had to share. Its hard to describe Thai massage. Its very gentle and soothing, you remain fully clothed and the massage therapist works over your entire body, from head to toe. Once the therapist has relaxed your muscles, they are then stretched out as if yoga was being done to your body. I have never experienced a massage that felt so good!

In Thailand this massage is part of the traditional multi-faceted approach to health care. Treating ailments is seen as a combination of herbal treatments, psychological/spiritual care and physical massage work. This tri-modal system is ancient and still practiced. At this point there is plenty of western medicine available in Thailand, but the Traditional Medicine is utilized as well.

When I went to Thailand back in 2000 I had the privaledge of going out to a temple in the countryside outside of Chiang Mai. I was studying Thai massage at the time and the Hospital where I was taking the class took a group of students out to work on local Thai farmers who had the day off because it was a national holiday (if I recall correctly it was the King's birthday). Out at this temple a lot of local people showed up to seek medical help. The Old Traditional Hospital had arranged to be there for the day with herbs and food and all the doctors. It was cute to see how the local people sought their health care. Most seemed to go up to the panel of doctors in groups. Walking up together they would chatter about their various ailments... even thru the language barrier (I do not speak any Thai other than friendly exchanges of Hello and how are you, etc) you could tell the people were trying to describe their problems together with their siblings or cousins around them, all chiming in their 2cents about what the major complaints were. It was funny to see this casual group diagnosis kind of thing. It was very honest. And then the doctors would write down their prescriptions on little colored slips of paper with directions to seek out the herbalists or the massage therapists or the monks (for spiritual help)... if they needed some massage work they would apprehensively hand one of us white kids their colored little slip of paper and we'd do some traditional Thai massage to their hard working bodies. It was pretty incredible. One old lady became so fond of me after her massage that she took me by the hand and found her sister and together they dragged me over to the food and made sure I had some lunch with them. It was cute. Again, I couldn't really speak to them... but I could say Hi and I had been taught the word for "pain" in case I might hurt someone :)

Anyhow, I digress with side-stories. I am full of them about Thai massage!

If you ever want to treat your body right, get your blood flowing and have the best massage of your life, contact Stephanie Glass and get a Traditional Thai Massage. And don't be affraid to request 2+hours, they are long massages, the longer the better! The massage I received on Monday lasted 3 hours and I was in heaven.

the Afternoon at the Portland Saturday Market

It was a cold cold cold rainy day at the PSM today. Whew. My heater ran out of fuel and my toe warmers only lasted 5 hours or so (thanks Maggie for the toe warmers!). It rained rained and rained some more.

But honestly it was a fun day. There were so many friendly faces and wonderful appreciative customers - Thank you!

Mid-afternoon the market became crowded with drunk people running around in themed costumes with decorated shopping carts filled with beer. They were on an urban race called the Idiot-a-rod. This is a play on the Alaskan Iditarod long distance dogsled race. Except Instead of dogs, it's people, instead of sleds, it's shopping carts, and instead of Alaska it's Portland Oregon.

As they ran past my booth I grabbed my handy-dandy camera and took some shots. It was pretty hilarious. I made the video above with my footage. I think it turned out really great!
Regardless, the race is always fun to watch and certainly a bright spot of my rainy cold day.

May I add - a lot of those people had to be cold as shizzy! Most of the outfits were tiny and revealing (what fun!) but they must have froze their butts off in the rain today!

• link for last years Idiotarod post
  

YouTube Remix Artist Kutiman

This series on YouTube is wonderful! I highly recommend watching the "About" and checking out this article by Merlin Mann on 43Folders

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Images on Glass III

The experiments with printing on glass continue...

A lot of these samples I am slumping into molds to make them into "sandwich plates".

I will take better pictures of some then!

In the meantime, some interesting observations:

-when we mixed glass powder into the ink and then printed on the glass the print turned out splotchy, like the ink stuck to the glass and turn out splotchy

-when we dusted glass powder onto the ink print that had more glass powder mixed in the ink, it was as if the two did not mix! The glass powder on top didn't actually fuse into the glass



- lastly, and most importantly, we found an ink and a process that we like.
unfortunately my note taking skills the other day were somewhat lacking, left a little sumthin to be desired - so I it was hard to decipher the differences between all the samples...

However - hopefully by the end of November we will have some sample plates available for sale so we can see what prints people are attracted to purchase on glass.

Felted Birds and Gray Days

I had a fun time today learning to felt birdies! This is my attempt #1 - I particularly like his hairdoo.

My felty good times were had at the first inaugural meeting of the IHLA. Hangin' out with my bitchez in the Idle Hands Ladies Auxiliary was awesome. Talk about making the best of a gray Portland day - this colorful felty fun was just what I needed! I made couple of birds, a cozy for felting needles (thanx for letting me keep a couple Maggie!!) and an orange chick rattle. I can't help myself but produce - my crafty hands just kept making one cool felted thing after another.

Check it out - the rattle is awesome, I used one of my Chinese medicine pill containers as the center of the chick, and I left just a couple of pills inside the ball (so it would rattle) and then felted the orange around the plastic container. Here is what the pill container looks like: (the larger ball is a wax covered plastic ball that you have to crack open to get at the inner plastic ball that contains the pills, the inner ball has a plastic cap that is not in the picture)And then this is what the rattle looked like in the end:

So morning-time was super fun, felty goodness with my beautiful friends.

This afternoon was Mac n' Cheese night at the glass studio, I brought broccoli n' cheese - it was delicious (although sorta soupy). Not only did I manage to eat many many cookies (I am growing a gut?! too much indulgence!) but I did manage to get some work done. I cut 140 glass circles and got them ready for the kiln, and Aimee came in today (I LOVE good help - and Aimee is the bestest!) and helped me continue to get ready for the holidays, converting my scrap piles into miniature mobiles, its a multi-step process!

I also got to meet Anne Marie of Glass Heart Studio. She makes amazingly beautiful boro glass plug earrings, swirls and curlies and swoops, in different plug diameters and different colors. They are really exquisite(check out her Etsy shop). She is moving into the train barn a few doors down from the Aquila Studio - it was really awesome to get to meet her tonight. Its an honor to have such good neighbors up there in N. Portland.

It may be raining, cold and gray here in Portland - but hey - I love this city and the people in it make the gray days pretty darned cool.

Fun Soggy Weekend

This weekend the weather here in Portland was rainy and gray, temperature in the 50s and sorta windy. And I was outside selling my artwork! Sheesh I am crazy :)

I actually had a fun weekend in spite of the forecast calling for constant rain and wind. After being depressed all week about the onslaught of this persistent crappy weather, I don't really know why I decided to vend this weekend. Saturday morning I showed up skeptical of my strange choice, dressed in my navy blue rain jacket, my rain boots , two layers of fleece sweaters and two pairs of long johns.

To make a long story a little bit shorter, I ended up switching booths with my neighbor Bob. That small change made my whole weekend so much more fun and exciting! I set up my booth in his spot (2 spots down the road from my reserved space) and he set up in mine. Bob makes incredible metal birds, lifesize and gorgeous, his business is Metal Art by Swan.

Residing in Bob's spot for the weekend was great! I think I really needed a little change of pace to brighten my weekend, and this was perfect. I absolutely love all my neighbors in my reserved space, they are awesome, don't get me wrong. It was just fun to be in a different location for a weekend... even though it was just two booths down :)

I got to hang with my friend Maggie, Papaver Jewelry, she is in the picture above, don't our booths look great even though the weather is sh*t and already getting dark! Oh I forgot to put my big red Leah Glass sign... when I remembered I just didn't bother cuz I figured it'd just get wet and I didn't feel like toweling it off.

And I got to meet many customers that were so friendly and kind. It was not the busiest of weekends, but in my new perspective I was basically right at the entrance to the market, and there weren't a whole lot of vendors, so I was very visible and colorful. People were walking down the road saying to their friends/family "Oh I like those mobiles, I have seen them online!" and man, that just makes me so darned proud - I can't even tell ya! And the fact that many mobiles and other creations of mine went home with new owners, that makes my day even sweeter!

Today I made a lot of rings (I thought that would be a good way of utilizing the rainy day and possibly rousing up a little business from people enjoying watching the process - it worked too!), so I thought I'd share a little video diddy of me demoing making rings.



If you are also curious about my ring making process, here is a tutorial I made years ago - it shows exactly how these are made. Just excuse the old website format... makes me think I should re-do this tutorial... that website it is on is an old template of mine that takes forever to load all the seperate pictures...

sheesh. :)

Images on Glass II

The experiments continue - my friend Jan and I made 22 more samples of printing onto glass. Do you see how amazing these blocks are (in the picture above)?! We used Rubber Duckies, a Hammer, Birds on a Line, a Benson Bubbler (water fountains in PDX), and a set of Hearts.

We were very methodical, trying 5 new types of ink (one image for each type of ink so its easy to remember!), an oil based ink (last time we used a rubber based ink), a lithograph ink, an etching ink and an oil based ink that had metal in it (it was called "Copper Gold"), and lastely a transparent Rubber based ink that we mixed colored glass powder into it. We also tried different colors of glass powders/frit (last time we used only black powder and frit).

Interesting observations: glass powder mixed with ink is possible, but it behaves weirdly. The ink sorta seems to cling to the glass particles and create fractal patterns. See: (pictured below is ink under a magnifying lens)
Okay, its come to my attention that the last video I posted from my on-going project of printing on glass, it was not a complete video. :) This was entirely my fault.... the video ended because I hadn't set up the glass for Jan to transfer the ink onto, so I had to stop the video to put down the camera and be helpful and arrange the glass. Jan has been doing the inking and I do the glass. So this next video is much more complete - although I am once more leaving out the end - sheesh! Because inevitably I have to put down the camera in order to pick up the glass frit/powder...



my apologies for having a volume control issues - enjoy the music :)

so if you watched this whole thing (its 3 minutes) and wonder what comes next... basically its simple, I take some glass powder or frit and dump it onto the glass, covering the ink, then I turn the glass over and tap it to knock off all the excess powder/frit. Sometimes I have to take a paint brush to dust off a little clingy stuff, but mostly thats it. Then I fire the glass at a full fuse and the ink is burnt away, completely, leaving behind the print made by the glass powder/frit.

See here for our first results after kiln firing.

And the last experiment of the day was transporting all this glass - we worked at Jan's printing studio this time (the glass studio gets a little busy on the weekends and we need lots of space) and made two trips with the car to carry the inked glass to Aquila. It worked out very smoothly, although I really didn't push things, I just folded up my back seats and laid it all out on trays.

Enjoy!

Taking a Hike in MacCleay Park

Much needed break time. Seriously, holiday prep makes me tired.

I checked out MacCleay Park this Wednesday. There's a beautiful hiking trail that put us right to the Audubon Society . We said hi to the birds. Ruby the Turkey Vulture here danced for us, although she didn't perform so nicely for the camera!

Theres an incredible old stone building about a mile out in the woods that was a bathroom, but in the 60's the plumbing was all messed up by trees falling down and up-rooting. Now the building is a skeleton of what it once was. There are ferns growing right out of the stones, its quite beautiful.I liked this park very much. There's a creek, the Balch creek, evidently the City of Portland's first water supply. We saw trout in the creek, they are a protected bunch the "Cutthroat Trout". Oh and there is a really really tall Douglas Fir in this park, supposedly the tallest in any American city, 241ft tall. It was huge and beautiful. And there is a beautiful bridge that runs over the park, with a red metal sculpture that kinda reminds me of Calder out in the grassy field.

Today at the Glass Studio...

My friend Jan and I played around today with the idea of printing on glass. She brought over a bunch of blocks she has carved over the years and between her inking skills and my glass skills, I think we are going to make some super sweet art glass!!!

I'm so exciting, bubbling with ideas. I posted pictures on my flickr... here is a video, you can see a bunch of the beautiful blocks she brought to play with.

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