One of those days

The metal clay challenge that I'm participating in is due next Friday. Last night I finished the pieces for it (although I wasn't feeling that it was really working.... but I needed to get it done.)

The piece includes a dichroic glass cab that I made myself. I was really pleased with the way the focal point was turning out although how it would hang from the kumihimo beaded chain was another story. So I fired it, opened the door until the temperature dropped below 1000 degrees, closed the door and left the studio. Today I was pretty excited to see how it turned out. Well, I should have just left it in the kiln and not looked. The top piece of dichroic glass "shrank" and slid to the side. That wasn't the worst of it, the clear back piece of the glass devitrified to an ugly smoky gray. Yuck.... what a disappointment not to mention the amount of silver in the piece. (When will I learn to make small delicate pieces?) I keep trying to talk myself into thinking that it really doesn't look that bad. (But it does.) I doubt I'll get the challenge done in time as I'm out of clay and now the design has to take a different direction. (Necessity is not only the mother of invention but also of design.)

I did my gallery sitting today in the Graffiti Gallery which is open from 11-7:00 on

Fridays and Saturdays. My stint was from 11:00-3:00 with the second shift coming in at 3. Well, about 3:22 I started to have my doubts about the second shift which was right. They weren't coming and as I had another commitment at 4:00 the Gallery had to be closed for the rest of the day.

I had a little work to do before I left for my evening commitment. One of the things I did was take pictures of my beautiful piece (not!) with the dichroic cab. Took about five or six pictures trying to capture the ugliness of the piece to share on the blog. Do you see any pictures? When I went to transfer them to the computer it said there were no pictures to transfer. What the.....? Don't know what happened there either. Will try again next time I'm at the studio.

At least the evening went well. Made it to Franklin's Light up night with the family and brought the middle grandson home to spend the night. He's playing golf right now.

Guess my bad day actually started last night when I tried to take the oldest grandson to see the new Harry Potter movie. Of course it was sold out! But we did see Mega Mind instead so all was not lost.