I want to break freeeeeeeeee

Well, today I had a lesson in how fragile glass can be... but let me start at the beginning!

I went to the cold shop in the morning where I made curved lines with a 90 degree diamond cutter.  It was really hard, my lines were all over the place and in general complete crap... Everyone kept saying that these lines are SUPER hard and that after a few bowls I will start to get the hang of it... Here is bowl number 1:

lines don't meet, they don't even curve properly... You can see slippage near the edges. yuck

But, below is bowl #2.  I kicked line ass!

The lines meet at the top AND bottom and kind of match one another!

So, I happily showed them to Tove and Rebecca who were amazed at my progress and said I made the best they had seen all day! Ha!

So, I got to do these cool curved lines that looked like leaves that had dots on straight lines and dots in the middle of the leaves... It is hard to explain and imagine, sorry. I worked and worked and my little fingers had turned to prunes from holding it with the water running over the cutting wheel.  I was doing AMAZING and it was wonderful... so I was so pleased with the piece that I showed it to Tove and Rebecca who were also amazed and suggested that I fix up the edges of the bowl so they were smooth and not sharp so I could buy it instantly and take it home and fill it with peanuts of candy.  I grinded and grinded and was walking to the polishing thing-y andddddd

dropped the bowl on the cement floor.

Now it looks like this:

It was supposed to look like this:

This is the cool, kind of 50's design pattern that I was following on the sample bowl...  see, you try to explain that pattern to someone without a picture, it is difficult!

The really ironic part was that when that happened, I SWEAR, my Itunes shuffle was playing "I Want To Break Free" from Queen.  I just stood there with broken glass all around me while everyone stared and went "awwwww" with Freddie Mercury singing in my ears.  I don't understand how no one heard me yell out a curse word the other day but they all heard the class clink and break... maybe b/c it is everyone's night mare noise.  It was a tragic scene.  I had to laugh, I mean how many times in life do you have moments that ironic?!?!?! It was a cosmic joke I think... Rebecca rushed over and was like "I'll clean this up, why don't you just go get something else fun to do!" which made it a little easier to not be so depressed about the episode.  

I got to work on pieces that I actually blew for the first time today! I ground the tops and bottoms on the jars I blew in the optical molds:

Look at those crazy edges!

I am very pleased and I may keep this goofy pair for future collectors items of course!

Here are some of the beads I worked on yesterday also:

Those two stick things on the left are the sticks that you make them on with this non-stick stuff, just like what you paint a kiln shelf with!  But, those two got stuck... here are some of the cute and different ones:

I made one that looks like a teapot by accident... this is the best pic I took apparently, sorry about the quality:

The hole is going the wrong way, so it would have to be a charm or an earring... maybe I could make one that looks like a teacup and they could be a little pair of earrings?  

After lunch I went to the hot shop where almost all of the glass was gone from the furnace, AGAIN.  I made some triangle candle holders.  I just blew into a triangle mold which had kind of hammered texture to make the candle light look really cool.  I hope they turn out as cool as they sound!  Then we learned to make this interesting black stuff called Sax-Smörja.  We use it on the jacks instead of beeswax.  It has tree sap, animal fat (except we used a tea candle instead), kimrök (black soot from an industrial factory), beeswax and some sort of clear liquid that came in a bottle that said something about nitrogen... it was odd and smelled very weird.  We boiled it, then dropped it in cold water then quickly scooped it out and had to squeeze all the water out of it and into balls to put on the blowing benches.  A very odd session, but apparently the recipe came from a billion years ago in a old factory from down the road... and Orrefors has some special secret recipe, that I now have (in Swedish of course)!!!

This evening I had a girls night kind of with Rosanne and Yenni!  Rosanne made some interesting couscous with stir-fry veggies and a can of crushed tomatoes.  Then we decided to paint or nails and watch a movie... Here are the ingredients for a very good girls night:

It reminded me a little of Sweet Briar, where I  very seldom did this sort of thing now that I think about it...

Here we are at the end of night, we painted our nails, put a facial peel on, ate candy and promptly chipped our nails on the chocolate... good times.  Rosanne has the teal, Yenni had bright orange and I am in purple.  We will see how long these last in the hot shop!!!  But I really like the purple... nice fun color :)