Pictures of Glass Blowing

Right before I left to go out of town I had the opportunity to get into the hotshop and blow some glass with a friend. I am hoping to do more now that I am back! Maybe today, maybe Thursday... either way I am exciting and pumped!
I ended up hanging out at Elements for a few hours waiting for the kiln to cool down (so we could see the pieces before we left!) and I took a bunch of pictures while lolly-gagging around the studio. I love the imagery of a hotshop. The glow of heat, the sweaty men, the furnaces and kilns and other equipment. I also love the smell of beeswax and burntness that permeates a hotshop. Its exquisite.
Elements is a public access hotshop that many different gaffers use - that day there was a group of men working on pulling cane - in the picture above you can see them all working on the hot gather together - I loved how the lighting created a look of silhouettes.
These two pictures are of a beautiful piece that Aaron was working on, it was a rebellious piece of glass and kept leaping off the pipe and bouncing across the concrete floor. What you are looking at here is a new puntil attached to the piece and the flame keeping the glass hot as the puntil cools down (the puntil must be rigid enough to hold the weight of the piece before they can really pick it up and get it into a glory hole to re-heat). The wood underneath the glass burned a bit, but Brandyn simply stepped on it and put out the flames once the glass was safely in the glory hole. This was fantastic to watch and take pictures of - I am guessing it was a bit less fun for the artists chasing the hot glass around the studio!!

Beautiful Pictures

These images are in the slideshow on the previous post - but I had to take a moment to re-highlight them! They are so beautiful! The colors of these petals amaze me!
Part of the Conservatory at the Longwood Gardens is a beautiful water lily display. Beautifully set up with multiple shallow pools where the water lilies can thrive in the dark waters. The big leaves grow up to foot a day! The flowers were varying sizes, some big like dinner plates and some smaller like dalias.

Longwood Gardens

This week I went to Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania while visiting Tim's family. I had been to this garden about 10 years ago when I was in college. For a few semesters I was in an amazing Ayuvedic medicine course and my instructor Dr. Patel took us out there to the botanical gardens. Its an amazing property bought and cultivated by Pierre du Pont back in the early 1900's. Its hard to describe if you've never been, you could walk around for hours and not see it all. Its like gardens of Versailles in Pennsylvania!

There was a particularly wonderful exhibit going on called: "Making Scents - the art and passion of fragrance". Throughout the garden scented plants were specially indicated and there were these neat sniffer devices on some displays. There were also some displays about scent extraction and a room full of perfume bottles and fragrance oils. And I could take pictures of it all! (I asked to be sure) Glass Perfume bottles are so gorgeous, with their precious contents...

When I was a little girl I was fascinated by my mother's perfume collection. So one time I took all the bottles down and poured a bit of each one into one bottle. I was creating my own custom scent! A little of this and a little of that... her expensive collection being wasted ridiculously! Until she smelled the horror wafting down the stairs and came up to see what I was doing. I was reminded of this experience as I wandered the beautiful room filled with perfume bottles. I recognized the no. 4711 - that was one of the perfumes in my mom's collection. She took me to Paris as a pre-teen and one of my most treasured memories is going into an old perfume shops. Shelves and shelves of au du toilettes. It was incredible, something I will never forget. I wanted to take them all home.

Rogue Celebrates the Portland Saturday Market

Tim and I got back in town just in time to go to the vendor party at Rogue Brewery last night. Great timing eh?! I swear it wasn't on purpose.

A few years ago Rogue Brewery created a beer in honor of the Portland Saturday Market and started selling a selection of their locally handcrafted beers in a booth with us. There was a party to celebrate this new relationship, they invited the vendors to come eat and drink in the bar on NW 14th. This year they had another party with us to again celebrate this great relationship! Honestly its really touching how highly they think of the Portland Saturday Market and it has truly been beneficial for both Rogue and the PSM to have their beer selection available on the weekends down on the waterfront.

I still had a bottle of the first beer they created for the market (pictured above on the left) and the current PSM brew (above on the right)
We all pledged to the Rogue Nation and toasted the Portland Saturday Market.
And our beloved Ryan, the nice man who serves the beer in the booth every weekend was officially inducted into the market as an honorary vendor. Basically he got a bumper sticker, a teeshirt and a gift certificate. You see, even though he has been setting up and selling with us for years, he has never actually been a vendor. Technically he is a Rogue bartender who works the PSM booth. Anyhow, he fits into the PSM family very well and treats everyone with respect and generosity. So we made him an honorary vendor.

Pictures of Bubbles

I love how bubbles make kids so happy! It seems pretty universal. Tim's 1year old nephew loves bubbles - he chirps "ba-bles!" and laughs at them. We are visiting him this week and I have been enjoying taking pictures of all his cuteness. Tim's Dad was asking if pictures of bubbles turn out very well and I told him I'd post some on my blog :) because they really do! Especially at night with a flash (as can be seen above)

Early Fall Weather

The weather was incredible yesterday - I took a bunch of pictures outside the front of my house... the sun was shining so brightly that I had to come outside and capture the moment. A happy cat, some beautiful flowers... my cherry tomatoes: they are so delicious - but why now? Its almost October and they are just now excellent and turning orange at a rapid pace. I shouldn't complain, but it really has been a strange year for tomatoes in Portland. What really lured me outside with my camera was the mobiles I have hung in front of the house. They were glowing and dancing in the breeze. The shadows on the walls were almost more beautiful than the mobiles themselves!

Pictures from Stumpsucking

Above and below are pictures of the same little octopus - above you can see it is encased in clear glass and made into a paperweight, below is what it looked like beforehand. So exciting. The picture above was taken spur-of-the-moment... so it leaves some to the imagination... you'll just have to believe me for now that it turned out pretty great and totally 3D inside the paperweight.

And now for some action shots! I was having fun with my camera while Brandyn sweated and did all the hard work :) Until my camera battery ran out...

Here I am setting up for the sucking... we preheated the little things in the pipe-warmer on a metal plate... nothing fancy but it seemed to work great. Also preheated the stumpsucker with a hand torch that you can see resting on the table.Brandyn seemed to need about a 2 dip gather to pick up the little things in this 1 1/2" stumpsucker. It was actually quite easy (although to be fair he did all the work!)can you see the octopus inside this glass in the picture below? This is after another dip was taken over the encasement...After some shaping with a neat steel marble mold we turned them into paperweights and put them in the annealer. It was pretty cool... I look forward to doing it again. More pictures to come of the finished paperweights... I am going out of town (visiting Tim's family in PA) and I won't get to play more with this until I get back (including taking pictures of the finished paperweights).