Glass Blowing Demo, Quilt Show, And Another Vessel

I've been busy in the wet lab lately, preparing for the upcoming holiday show/sale at Olive Hyde Art Gallery in Fremont, CA. Here's the latest vessel that I finished - I just put the collar and faceted lemon quartz on it the night before last. The collar is a spiral rope, and the vessel is also adorned with peridot chips.

I have three more vessels that are ready for embellishments - all I need is time, yep. But alas, tonight and tomorrow night I'm teaching bead making classes so my vessels will have to wait until Friday night.

Over the last two weekends I've hauled mom along with me to a couple of events - here are some pictures that I took.

The first event we attended was a glass blowing demo at BAGI, where I teach glass bead making classes. I had the pleasure of watching Marc Petrovic create a blown glass fish, with assistance from Treg Silkwood, who teaches glass blowing classes at BAGI. I was sitting a bit far from the action, so my pix aren't the best - but you'll get the idea.

When Marc initially blew the piece, the mouth end of the fish was attached to the blow pipe. After Marc shaped the tail, he attached a punty to the rear side of the fish and removed the fish from the blow pipe. In this picture, Treg is holding the punty steady while Marc shapes the mouth of the fish.

Here's Marc giving the fish a good heating with the torch.

After Marc has applied some fins, he uses the torch to heat the fish while he does more shaping.

And here, Marc is applying hot glass to make another fin, with assists from Treg and Jon Scally.

And now for something completely different...

The second event was the annual Pacific International Quilt Festival. I think that show gets bigger and bigger every year! We were there for 6 hours on Saturday and didn't get to see any of the wearable art or vendors. I was going to go back on Sunday, but there's just too much to do here in my "labs". I'm glad I didn't wait until Sunday to take pix of some of my faves. Unfortunately, I didn't get the artists' names who made them. Here are pix of my absolute favorites in the show. And go figure... most of them involve trees and/or leaves. :-)

These are definitely not your grandma's "just throw it on the bed" quilts...

And now I have to get ready to go teach my bead making class. It's a special topic class - we're going to be making hearts! I'll be bringing some of my own purple glass so I can donate purple hearts to the Beads of Courage program. Each child receives a purple heart bead at the end of his or her treatment.

Now go have yourselves a happy and creative day!