Friday, October 28, 2011

"Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana." - Groucho Marx

So, my life has been dominated mainly by wineglasses... sadly not enough of them are full of wine haha.  We have been making them for two weeks now! They are getting better, but our expectations are getting higher which is not helping the amount being produced.

I have no idea what day these are from but here are some glasses from the end of last week I think:
 I never seem to make two the same size!
 And, they are all differently shaped... Vegard's are all almost the same! I don't know how he does it but I am jealous because his don't look like this!
 Here is a close up of my first goblet! It stands... and is HUGE! I make a fist around the stem part! It is a free blown glass, avolio, blown stem, avolio and then a blown stem.
 This is Ake's... MUCH better!
 Saturday I ended up going to the glass museum in Växjö.  There we met Astrid Gate (Simon Gate's, the inventor of graal, great great grandaughter) and saw some of here cool graals.
 It is three layers of graal, worked over and over again finally blown up by Micke Johansson.  She also did the engraving on this guy:

Also, there was this station where you made a sculpture from pieces of old glass...
 And then this lovely woman told a story inspired by the sculpture! She was a professional story teller and told the sweetest, funniest stories ever!
 This is Mad's called The Power of Woman
 This is Björn's called Indiska (Indian) Beach Burden.
 And mine called Stratosphere... there is goat and a gold fish on it at the bottom.  I will take more pictures when we get them back from the museum.  They are going to keep them for a while on display.
 There was also an exhibition of Functional Glass on display.  It was really neat (I got a book about it) and I remember some of the pieces from seeing my Grandmother here in Sweden having them.
 Also, and what we thought would be the most exciting was the talk to be made by Ludvig Löfgren who makes all the skulls and crazy stuff like that at Kosta.
 He gave a talk, which I couldn't understand at all (but was apparently pretty boring) about what inspires him and some of his works.
Then he showed a ton of pictures of making this car! It is a custom built car with a bunch of glass in it.  Pretty cool, but tiny I think.  There is glass in the grill, steering wheel, gas petal, gear shift, gas tank and part of the engine! Pretty cool, I want to see the car in real life!  Anyway, the video is not boring so you should watch it!

Then this week at school has been more wine glasses! 
 And another really bad goblet, but I am getting better at remembering all the steps and messing up less of them each time... so that is progress, sort of.
 It has been a rough week, the strain of a long distance relationship has been felt by both Sam and I.  Don't worry, we are OK and going strong still, just a bump along the way.  It is typical that we should struggle when the end of the long distance is so near! But, the theory that blowing glass sucks when your love life sucks held true this week.  But, today, Thursday all is well again and glass went great!

But, I made these on Monday with Vegard.  I am making him make flowers! Mwhahaha... he hates things like glass flowers, or fruit or pointless things.  So, now he has to make flowers for my wine glasses! Maybe I will make some that have an apple as the stem next! hahahaha. 
 They are not great, but they are flowers, so I think they have some potential.
I think I could do some different spin offs with green stems like stalks and leaves... we will see!

 And here are some wineglasses on parade! I had to clean out the trolleys that bring the glass down from the factory to the school of the things I want to keep... so here is a small pile of glasses.

Also, a random bit of information... In the house I live in you can rent a room for the night or weekend.  This weekend the house was rented by tons of people with dogs. I assumed they were sheep herding dogs, there is a competition here sometimes, but NO! They were sled pulling dogs! The Swedish Championship was being held somewhere near by! And my neighbors were the 3rd fastest dogs in ALL of Sweden! They were adorable "polar dogs" who normally race in the snow... also known as Siberian Huskies (but these were smaller then the ones I am used to).  AND, yes AND... One of them was related to the famous Balto! Kind of cool!

Also, this nice article was recently in the Washington Times with some really nice photos of The Glass Kingdom and a nice article about how spectacular it is here in general... you should check it out!

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