Copper Powder in Glass

Check Out My Beer Bottle Leaf Earings

I received the most wonderful earrings in the mail today. Brian of WesternArtGlass made these beautiful leaves out of a the glass bottle from this Italian beer (pictured is his DIL in some stunning ginko beerings). I love the way Brian creates leaves with his stained glass skillz. He makes mobiles too - we did a trade :)

These little bitty beer bottle leaf earrings are just delicious. Beerings :)

Here's another example of his earrings if you feel the need to own your own :)

oak leaves made out of Belgian Triple Karmeliet

Above is a photo of my new beerings. What is really neat to me is that it is a Moretti La Rossa beer, the beerrings have the "Moretti" brand pressing from the beer bottle glass. Makes me think its may be the same type of glass that I make beads out of, Moretti glass, as far as I know all Moretti glass is a COE of 104. Neat :)

Images on Glass IV

The printing images on glass experiments with my artist friend Jan resumed today. And we today added Copper Powder to the mix. You can see I wore a mask, and I used an exhaust hood right above the powder... protection is a must.




Its been a while since we've gotten to play... after a small hiatus due to weather and the holidays, we are starting back anew with new tests. My notes were pretty crappy on the early testing, so we never really could figure out how we achieved the results that we liked. So its sorta back to square one.

I did some tests with applying fine black powder to wet oil based copper/gold ink.

Jan mixed the oil based ink with a transparent white ink that we had been using, the transparent white is really weird stuff.
I am not sure if we will use any more of this transparent white, it made a huge mess and you can see in the picture if you zoom in that the white makes funny patterns on the transfer. In the end we chose to use the blue instead of the transparent white.


We did lots of testers with this copper powder that Jan bought. After printing onto the glass with the blue oil based ink I applied the powder to the wet ink. We used one block (the heart) that was very solid, and one black that was very detailed (a ginko leaf, not pictured here). I then applied a clean piece of clear glass on top of this for a fuse fuse fire.

Then we also did a batch where we mixed the copper powder in to the ink. And we did all of these copper tests twice, once with a -100 grade copper powder and again with a -325 grade copper powder. I am intrigued to see what the copper powder does. It may not be impressive, it may be really neat! It was fun stuff to work with too, I took some pictures of the patterns it was making:

links to other Image Experiment posts:

• http://leahglass.blogspot.com/2008/11/images-on-glass-experiment.html

• http://leahglass.blogspot.com/2008/11/images-on-glass-ii.html

• http://leahglass.blogspot.com/2008/11/images-on-glass-iii.html

Printer Test Page

After discussing home printers with my Dad, he sent me this great link to a color print test page - its a PDF - I fgured it'd be a one page print kinda thing. Its 20 pages long!!! And pretty intense. I love it! So I had to share :)

http://www.fho-emden.de/~hoffmann/a3gencolorhigh.pdf

I did not print all 20 pages, but I printed the graph shown above and the new Canon performed spectacularly! Its a very geeky printer test, really seems to break down the ins and outs of a printer.

A Good Simple (and Cheap!) Home Printer for the Craftyperson

Holy moly - I've just plugged in my new printer, and printed out a few things - and WOW. I'm impressed - this is a good printer.

Recently, x-mas gift from Amazon, I ordered a Canon PIXMA MP620 for a steal ($109 - on sale right now) ... I simply need a new printer, my inkjet is from the '90s and its still going strong (slow slow death of the good ol' printer)

This is what I know I like in a simple home printer:

• cheap ink

• good quality image prints

• quick cheap B/W prints

• cheap efficient ink

I know, I said cheap ink twice. Its important. The last thing we all need is a printer that costs $70 to replace the ink.

This Canon had all that and its wireless and its a copier/scanner as well, and it was inexpensive to boot. So I bought it, there were many many good reviews speaking about the ease of setup.

I plugged it in and printed out a few pictures. Stunning. Biggest perk: this printer prints to the edge of the page.

Then I played around with its functions to test it out and printed some "Template" pages it had. For instance, a piece of lined notepaper, or music paper, or a piece of graph paper (it even printed in that funny blue like real graph paper) - I don't know why I am so impressed by a dumb feature like this - but I am! Did I mention it prints to the edge of the page!

Okay, so I haven't gotten it hooked up wireless yet. Supposedly that is very easy. But honestly, it took me a while to clean up and prep for the new printer in its new area... and I got the impression from the manual that you had to hook it up wired first to get it all recognized to go wireless... or that's what I'm hoping :) This computer is pretty smart (vista), so I am sure once I figure out how to plug in an IP address to the printer I will be able to print wirelessly.

Okay - so there's my super positive review so far. I will certainly pipe up about it if the printer turns out to be a lemon.

I've never had a printer that printed to the edge before, there was always that 1/4" margin that the printer used to feed the paper.

New Year Good Luck Give-Away!

Guess how many Lady Duds are in this jar

Good luck in the New Year! Hopefully 2009 will bring many smiles, good times, positive changes and manageable stress levels. :) Best of luck to all of us!

As a fun game to welcome in the new year - I am giving away all of these little glass ladybugs. Ah... I should add that they are sorta weird, all "seconds" (as in, some have 3 eyes, or none, or just look wrong, etc). They are beads (there is a hole going thru them) and they are small (you could put one on a dime). Lady bugs to bring you good luck - Aimee calls them "Lady Duds" - I like that!
So here's how the game works: Guess how many Lady Duds are in the jar! There are more than 5 and less than 50. The closest guess wins the lot of 'em - for free!

Game runs thru Jan. 9th, 2009. Anyone can enter - feel free to give it a stab (only one guess per person)

Good Luck!

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