Take today for example, there I was in the studio happily making glass shades for some pendant lights I’m working on.  All of the sudden out of the corner of my eye I see a movement inside the studio just a few feet from where I was reheating my glass.  When I turned to look, I was startled to find out it was a garter snake… inside the studio!  (Relatively) close to my feet!  Ready at a moments notice to slither up my leg!  I could definitely tell that’s what it was planning…  Okay so maybe it wasn’t going to slither up my leg, but in the midst of my mental agitation I accidentally stuck the glass shade I was making to the door of the glory hole.  Thanks to that little snake I completely wrecked my piece.  And actually it wasn’t a little snake at all… it was over 2 feet long!  Luckily it didn’t take the snake long to slither away into a gap in the rock foundation of the barn, leaving me slightly nervous and definitely distracted.  It’s not that I am afraid of snakes, it’s just that I prefer that we keep a healthy distance from each other, especially when I’m working with hot glass.

This is actually not the first time I have wrecked a piece I was working on due to wildlife interference.  There has been more than one occasion when I have been swooped at by a bat in the middle of making something.  There is nothing like getting dive-bombed by a bat to really get the old adrenaline pumping.  Again, each time this happens I have either dropped the piece or stuck it to the side of the glory hole in my nervous attempts to get out of the way to avoid an inevitable bat-entanglement in my hair.

It clearly pays not to be complacent while rural glassblowing… you never know what is going to happen!

Working with glass is a fluid process, and as we shape our glass on the pipe the subtle changes of where we heat the glass, cool the glass, shape the glass and inflate the glass can result in changing the piece dramatically.  It really is a game of inches, as I think many art forms are.  But it’s something to think about… when I’m in the ‘zone’ in the studio – totally focused on what I’m doing – these subtle movements and adjustments happen so naturally, as if my conscious mind has decided to stay out of it and let my subconscious figure it out.  When I’m struggling with a piece, my conscious mind takes over and more often than not all hell breaks loose as I fight with the glass, fight with my tools and fight with myself.  When I’m at this point there is no such thing as subtle movements.  It’s like watching an angry robot trying to blow glass, there is just no fluid motion, no flexibility.

But these small movements are what take a piece from being good to being great.  Unable to touch our medium with our hands, we rely on tools, heat, motion and gravity to shape the glass, all the while making split second decisions about its aesthetic outcome.  It’s incredible to think that our conscious minds are assessing, critiquing and designing so rapidly, and all the while our subconscious is in the background – firing out little messages to our muscles to perform these incremental adjustments.  Crazy!

Things were going pretty well for awhile, and then the planets unaligned and bad things started to happen… first I broke a hole in the bottom of one.  Then the next one fell to the floor and smashed while I was puntying up.  Then  I broke a hole in the bottom of the next one.  Then I accidentally racked the next one off the yoke and it fell off the punty and onto the floor.  Then I ran out of white powder colour.  And then it was time to stop.  Despite my lack of success towards the end, I did manage to get quite a few in the annealer and was pretty happy with what I did make.  I do, however, have a sneaking suspicion that they won’t be as opaque as I hoped, so I will have to see tomorrow when they got out of the annealer.

So to quench the thirst of other process-curious people like myself, I have created a new page on my website called ‘In Progress‘ where you can check in and see what I’m working on at the moment.  I encourage you all to comment and provide feedback as well… working here in solitude in my former-general store-turned-lighting-studio doesn’t exactly make for an ideal focus group situation!

So enjoy learning about what goes in to my pieces, and experience the slightly crazy journey from conception to completion…. :)

Just yesterday while planning my new pendant designs, the idea of a table lamp crossed my mind…. so I completely forgot about pendants and spent 15 minutes drawing table lamps and picking out some colours that would look good.  After I wasted enough time on this distraction, I then decided table lamps are just not my thing and that it would kill me slowly and agonizingly just to force myself to make a table lamp, and that there was no way I would ever make a table lamp – ever – and crumpled up my drawing and threw it away.  After a few minutes of pondering the meaning of my life in relation to table lamps, I thought ‘maybe they’re not so bad’ and dug around a few banana peels and icky papertowel to find my crumply drawing.  Once flattened out, I realized it was a crappy design anyways, and crumpled it back up and threw it out again.  By then I felt it was too momentous of a hassle to worry about pendant lighting after that, and gave up completely on all hope of ever designing anything.  And that is about how every one of my ideas goes, and in fact it is a small miracle that I have even been making anything in the glass studio at all with this pattern of behaviour.

Over the course of the last couple of weeks I have begun to realize that I really need to focus.  Like REALLY focus, not just write a few lists and choose a course of action.  I mean complete overhaul of my personality focus… come up with a plan and implement the crap out of it without getting sidetracked by distractions and new ideas.  I know even as I type this, it is going to be downright impossible for me… but here’s hoping, right?

So I have been dabbling in it really… a few chandeliers here and there, and one client who really believed in me which started this whole avalanche.  So fast-forward (well… more like slow-forward) to one month ago: I was pondering the futility of my current business success (or lack thereof) and realized that I have really lost my passion for a lot of the things I have been making, and the reason I have been continuing is because, well, they sell.  And there you have it.  I have hit my handblown glass bottle and tumbler plateau I guess, and have come to the crossroads that every artist eventually gets to: Do I make work that sells so I can pay my bills in a relatively stress-free manner, or do I kibosh my entire production line for the thrills and spills of high-end lighting? (and possibly go back to eating knock-off Kraft dinner and buying one ply toilet paper in the meantime)   Okay it might not get to that, but I do love a little drama.

So in the battle between money and happiness (by the way, I always end up picking happiness – regardless of the monumental size of my unpaid student loan) it’s pretty apparent to me which way the cards will play out.  The crossroads looms before me, and as production work tries to tempt me to follow its well-worn path, I run screaming in the other direction toward the light… handblown glass lighting that is.  And really nice lighting handblown glass at that.

I was pretty excited to make the blown glass shades back a couple of months ago, but then I got sidetracked with a few different projects in between and I kept forgetting to order socket components for it.

Fast forward until yesterday, I finally got my sockets together and built my fixture.  I am so excited about it, I am loving the two tone opaque/transparent glass.  Next week I’ll be back in the studio to make a few more of these!

No more 2 month procrastination!

So what has resulted in the  spring planning sessions is my decision to change the direction of my glassblowing business.  I have been circling around custom lighting over the last year or so, and have been really wanting to explore the incredible possibilities of custom glass lighting.  The more I think about it, the more I realize there is such a massive opportunity to create some really fabulous and well designed chandeliers and fixtures!

So now that I have reached a little more clarity in the direction of my business for 2012, I promise not to neglect my blog so much.  I have so many great projects started that I am really excited about sharing so stay tuned!

We are offering Free Shipping for all orders until December 15th, 2011.  To take advantage of this most splendid offer, use coupon code: XMAS2011 when you checkout.  We are also extending the offer to our Etsy Store as well, use the same coupon code.

Hooray!