Baubles

Look what I found while I was looking for something completely else, which of course still remains undetected. Since I had to move I'm always looking for things but seldom find them. I know exactly where I stored everything in the old flat but a lot of stuff seems to have disappeared along with it, although I know it must be somewhere.

These are unfinished machine-made Christmas tree ornaments. They are almost 20 years old. Back then we had a school trip to the glass works of Lauscha in Thuringia which has a 400 year old tradition of glassmaking. When we visited the factories we were allowed to take those with us. The upper one is an unfinished Christmas tree ball. It's already silvered and usually it would have been decorated with a handpainted design in one of the next steps. It has especially thick walls, thicker than the glass of light bulbs. It's much thicker than the thin-walled and fragile baubles traditionally used here for Christmas decoration. These bolder ones were made to be exported to the USA. (Aren't Americans able to handle fragile things?) The lower one should have become a walnut ornament. It shows quite well the process of forming the piece with a mould.
Outside of the factory building I saw the most amazing pile of scrap and rubble imaginable. A huge and beautiful glassy pile of broken Christmas baubles sparkling and glittering in the hot summer sun in all the colours of the rainbow. What a sight! It looked so unreal, truly magical.

Winter Night

One month ago I made this bowl. Now I finally baked it together with some other items I completed meanwhile. It's the most sparkly thing I ever made because I used glitter colours. I can't decide if it is tacky or gorgeous. It looks so much like a twinkling frosty winter night to me, although the white parts looked brighter before curing. Fimo glitter white seems to contain a big part of translucent clay. I spent 2 1/2 hours alone just placing the slices on the bowl's surface because the design evolved while I did it. I am slow, but I get completely absorbed in it when I do things like that.

My Week

My little plan failed. I wasn't able to do anything decent with my hands this week. My wrists just hurt like hell and my fingers are a bit swollen. Maybe I should plan to make some little things every second week rather than every other day, although I'm bursting with energy when it comes to new ideas. Today was the first day I touched polymer clay again but I was only able to make six beads. So I read some books instead. I loaned several books about art glass from the library because my visit in Glashütte and many, many pictures I found online roused my enthusiasm for this material again. We had a beautiful wall made of quite ordinary but nevertheless very fascinating glass bricks in kindergarten. I think of it all the time when I look at and drool over the pictured objects in the books.

At the beginning of the week I picked the last of my tomatoes. I grew them on my balcony. I had to move last year and since then I have a balcony and even better I have one that views southward. It would have been a waste not to try my gardening skills having such perfect conditions. I love tomatoes and I love peas - some of the most delicious things there are in my humble opinion. So I tried to grow them and surprisingly enough it worked. I sowed them myself. Eight tiny tomato seeds turned into a little jungle. I liked to watch them grow. I didn't do much else but giving them water and worry on hot and stormy days. Two of them grew as high as 250cm, so everything became a lot bigger than I thought. I had two different sorts of cherry tomatoes and one usual sort. They gave me plenty to eat in the past months and they even resisted the frosty nights we have now. But I had to harvest the last ones now, even though they're still green. This sounds like there were only a few left, but indeed I picked a batch of 242. My complete harvest from June till November has a total amount of 1340 tomatoes. I never expected that much!

Moody

I'm a bit angry lately. I feel very inspired and have some nice ideas for new canes and patterns in mind, but my hands just won't work. It's grey and cold and wet outside, fine weather for crafting but it makes my wrists hurt even more. Nevertheless I want to try to do some little things at least every other day. So I made some beads a few days ago but again I noticed I somehow lack the sense of how much pressure I actually apply so it took a lot of patience until I managed to make them round. Sometimes it feels like I always have to start from scratch again and there's no progress at all and then I think it is just worthless. But I'm addicted after all.

New pictures of old things

A few days ago I put an end to six clayfree weeks. This also inspired me to bring my blog into shape and today I finally added pictures of the things I made in the past couple of months to my gallery. It's a bit frustrating though to see that I wasn't able to do more. Others could probably do that in less than a week. But at least I made them at all. As you can see I'm very fond of bowls.