It is about 6 AM - on the plane and just checking that I’ve got the whole blog-by-iPhone thing working. If you are reading this then the answer is yes

This is what happens when the piece you’ve been working on falls just an inch onto the 30″ lap:

Last night was our third session of Vitreous Adventures.  Two more to go.

When the class wraps up I’ll post lots of details - but for now I’ll leave you to wonder about the meaning behind some pictures of mad glass science in progress.

One of the above had us so excited during the last class that we were in the studio long after we were scheduled to leave.

Stay tuned…

Okay, I know I owe you the continuation of the first blog entry - but with all the excitement over the last couple weeks I want to write about a few things while they are still fresh.

First - the Helios Road Trip.  We had two vans full of Helios friends who ventured to Texas A&M (about two hours from Austin) to see the university’s world class English cameo collection and the newer American pressed glass exhibit.

The excitement started when we learned that you should definitely not drive your van into a parking garage with a 6 foot 9 inch limit when the van says on the dashboard that it is 7 feet 6 inches tall.  The van got sort of stuck (the way that bowl got sort of stuck the time I forgot the kiln wash).  

[UT students and alumni insert your own Aggie joke here...]

Not to worry since kilnformers are ever the problem solvers.  Everyone in the un-stuck van piled into the stuck van.  The extra weight lowered the van enough to drive it out - teaching us a very important lesson:  We eat way too many donuts at Helios.  Heaven help us now that a frozen yogurt place has opened two doors down.  Maybe we should make the kilns treadmill-powered.

The extra delay caused by the vandemonium, though, made a few in the group anxious to get to our first stop:

Only then were we off to the MCS Forsyth Center Gallery to see the glass.

The gallery is located in the student union building, which is kind of a strange place for a collection that boasts art of this caliber:

But I’m blogging ahead of myself.

One of the unique parts of the A&M exhibit is the display of in-progress cameo work.  The docent explained that the collector Bill Runyon (who would eventually donate the art to A&M) flew to England when Thomas Webb & Sons was closing their business.  He purchased everything he could - including a number of unfinished pieces.  Several of these, like this one, are now on display:

Seeing the partially finished work really humanized the art, reminding me that real people sat down in front of their work benches to create this stuff.

They have a good “Story of Cameo” display across several cases.  I photographed all the narrative and have posted it here.  (The placards had to be photographed at odd angles and then “stretched” in Photoshop to make them more readable - apologies for the occasional distortion.)

We have a lot more photos (including many more finished pieces) in the Helios photo gallery.

So here’s the question I’m left with:  Does anyone invest so much of themselves into their work today - spending months or years on a single piece?

Back in 2000  (about the time we realized that the Y2K bug was not going to end civilization), I started making pens from exotic wood and antler.  After all, with the world clearly not about to end, it was time to find a new activity that required me to buy more stuff.  After all, giving into materialistic urges is just another way of being patriotic.  So I bought a lathe, pen kits, sanders, finishing waxes, a drill press, yada yada.  Everything the catalogs said I needed…I bought. 

I was overcome by dabbler’s delirium.

Make-stuff mania.

Hobbyist heat. 

And it wasn’t the first time.  

There have been so many obsessions (and so much money spent) over many years.  Stained glass.  Candles.  Origami.  Photography.  Insect taxidermy. 

(Okay, I made the last one up.  I think.  It is all really such a blur.  But in 2000 I was definitely in my “pen period”.  Definitely.)

At the same time, a friend of mine was flameworking - making gorgeous glass beads in a torch.  In addition to putting them on jewelry, she was putting them on pens.  Only the pens were made of plastic and seemed cheap compared to the beads.  So she asks me if I could make a better pen for her beads.

Challenged extended.

Challenge accepted.

A few googles later and I landed on warmglass.com, the original online home to glass fusers. 

I looked at a few forum postings and, while I was pretty sure it was in English (unless the word ”bubble” was leading a secret life with a different meaning in another language?) I had no idea what anyone was talking about.  I looked at a tutorial.  I visited the advertisers.  I ordered Brad’s book.  Hmm…this looks interesting.  Then I browsed the site’s artist gallery and came across this:

The hell with bead pens.  How did the artist (Bob Leatherbarrow of Calgary) make this?

What?  He made it from glass…in a kiln??  What is a glass fusing kiln and, more importantly, do they sell them at Michael’s or Hobby Lobby?

And so started a six month obsession reading every single post in the warmglass.com archives.

And Karen, my poor wife, could only sit back and watch while thinking “here we go again.”  And, damn, if this hobby didn’t look really, really expensive.

Expensive?  Neither of us had any idea.

To be continued…