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Today is the last day I will fire anything in the kiln before the Craft Fair this Fri - Sun.

I am fire polishing some earrings and three pendants. I also made four glass spoon rests and each one is so different. One of them is an amber color, another one is dark blue, another one is white with red shapes, and the last one is a blue iridized glass and I scattered short pieces of yellow stringer (very thin glass) on the top. All the glass I used is Spectrum System 96, www.spectrum.com.

I have been labelling each glass piece with a number and a price and entering the info into an Excel spreadsheet. Today I am taking pictures of everything I have made. For the glass pieces that I sell, I will put photos on the Gallery page of my website: www.mastersglassart.com. For the new glass pieces that I don't sell at the Craft Fair, I will put them on the Products page of our website for you to look at and buy :D

Well, wish me luck at the Craft Fair!! I hope to sell a lot at this Fair :)

Christine


Check out my Fused Glass Creations!
www.mastersglassart.com

Check out my other Glass Blog!
http://glassart.wordpress.com

Ever since we got the new element installed, I have been firing glass everyday. I made a really cool glass plate! I fused a layer of black glass over a layer of clear glass, then I put my yellow glass lace on top. After fusing all these layers together, I slumped it into an 8" square slumper. I am really happy about that one.

I also slumped some green Kokomo glass into a soap dish mold.

I love basketweave projects. I cut some purple and white opal art glass from Spectrum (www.spectrum.com) into 1/2" strips. I also cut strips with clear glass. Then I laid half of each glass down, so I ended up with four layers of glass. I fused this piece of glass and then slumped it into a Ball mold. It turned out great!! I will take pictures of all these things in a few days, so I can show you what I am talking about :)

Today, my husband and I glued bails onto a slew of pendants I made. I am glad that job is finished.

Christine


Check out my Fused Glass Creations!
www.mastersglassart.com

Check out my other Glass Blog!
http://glassart.wordpress.com

Surprising New Arctic Inhabitants: Trees By Andrea Thompson LiveScience Staff Writer posted: 09 March 2007 09:38 am ET

Rising temperatures fueled by global warming are causing forests of spruce trees to invade Arctic tundra faster than scientists originally thought, evicting and endangering the species that dwell there and only there, a new study concludes. Tundra is land area where tree growth is inhibited by low temperatures and a short growing season. In the Arctic, the tundra is dominated by permafrost, a layer of permanently frozen subsoil. Hot Topic Goldilocks and the Greenhouse What makes Earth habitable? This LiveScience original video explores the science of global warming and explains how, for now, conditions here are just right. The only vegetation that can grow in such conditions are grasses, mosses and lichens. Forests of spruce trees and shrubs neighbor these tundra areas, and the boundary where they meet is called the treeline. In summer, the permafrost thaws, and the tundra becomes covered in bogs and lakes, allowing a unique habitat for plants. Climate change, meanwhile, has extended the summer warming season and promoted tree growth, causing the treeline to encroach on the tundra. By looking at tree rings, researchers reconstructed a 300-year history of tree density and treeline position. The results show trees can creep up on the tundra faster than previously thought. “The conventional thinking on treeline dynamics has been that advances are very slow because conditions are so harsh at these high latitudes and altitudes,” said Ryan Danby of the University of Alberta. “But what our data indicates is that there was an upslope surge of trees in response to warmer temperatures. It’s like it waited until conditions were right and then it decided to get up and run, not just walk.” While in many places the idea of more trees is a good one, this Arctic takeover endangers species like caribou and sheep that thrive in the tundra, as well as the native people who depend on these species for their survival. The details of the study are published in the March issue of the Journal of Ecology. Danby plans to continue his research as a part of the International Polar Year research effort

The common view that nerves transmit impulses through electricity is wrong and they really transmit sound, according to a team of Danish scientists.
The Copenhagen University researchers argue that biology and medical textbooks that say nerves relay electrical impulses from the brain to the rest of the body are incorrect.
"For us as physicists, this cannot be the explanation," said Thomas Heimburg, an associate professor at the university's Niels Bohr Institute. "The physical laws of thermodynamics tell us that electrical impulses must produce heat as they travel along the nerve, but experiments find that no such heat is produced."
Heimburg, an expert in biophysics who received his PhD from the Max Planck Institute in Goettingen, Germany — where biologists and physicists often work together in a rare arrangement — developed the theory with Copenhagen University's Andrew Jackson, an expert in theoretical physics.
According to the traditional explanation of molecular biology, an electrical pulse is sent from one end of the nerve to the other with the help of electrically charged salts that pass through ion channels and a membrane that sheathes the nerves. That membrane is made of lipids and proteins.
Heimburg and Jackson theorize that sound propagation is a much more likely explanation. Although sound waves usually weaken as they spread out, a medium with the right physical properties could create a special kind of sound pulse or "soliton" that can propagate without spreading or losing strength.
The physicists say because the nerve membrane is made of a material similar to olive oil that can change from liquid to solid through temperature variations, they can freeze and propagate the solitons.
The scientists, whose work is in the Biophysical Society's Biophysical Journal, suggested that anesthetics change the melting point of the membrane and make it impossible for their theorized sound pulses to propagate.
The researchers could not immediately be reached for comment.

Last Saturday, I was doing some minor maintenance to my kiln. I was vacuuming out a few things that had fallen to the bottom of my kiln. I was also securing the elements when something happened and one of the elements broke right in half. What a bummer!! :(

I ordered more elements from a great website, www.kilnelements.com. The owner, Stan Horton, was willing to make the elements for my kiln on Sunday and have them in the mail early Monday morning. I received them on Wednesday!! Wow, what service.

My husband and I installed the new element on Thursday, but we needed a heavy duty crimper to finish the job. We went to the "Big City" on Friday, today, and bought what we needed, plus a few other things :)

When we got home, we finished installing the element and fired the kiln up with nothing else in the kiln. It must be to burn off any residue from the new element.

I am all ready to fire some glass tomorrow!!

Christine


Check out my Fused Glass Creations!
www.mastersglassart.com

Check out my other Glass Blog!
http://glassart.wordpress.com

This is one of the pendants I have made recently!! I call it "End of Lava Flow." The red glass was made this way by fusing glass frit. I took some pieces from the final piece and fused it onto a piece of white glass. I think it came out great!

It is a challenge to fire something in my kiln every day!

I have a manual ceramic kiln, which requires a lot of babysitting -- I have to watch the temperature as it heats up and then when I need to hold the temp. for 10-30 minutes, I need to be right by my kiln watching the temp. I also need to carefully watch the temps as I anneal -- making sure the kiln cools off slowly and holding at certain temps.

So, since I have to spend a lot of time by my kiln, which is in our garage, I can't work on my glass, which is in our basement. I can do a little here and there. It's not practical to move the kiln or move my workspace to be next to each other. There just isn't space left in our garage and in the winter, it is pretty cold. I don't want to have the kiln in the basement, because of the fumes when I use kiln shelf paper. Also, my husband spent a lot of time hooking up the 220 volt plug for the garage.

What I really need, of course, is a controller for my kiln. This allows for programming firing schedules, so I wouldn't need to be at the kiln watching the temperature and turning it up or down when I need to. We are going to get something better when our tax return comes, so I can't wait for that!


Christine



Check out my Fused Glass Creations!
www.mastersglassart.com

Check out my other Glass Blog!
http://glassart.wordpress.com