Venturing into pastures new!

I love glass, you know I do :) and I do enjoy making beads, but to be quite honest for ages I have really really wanted to do other things too!  I love marbles and sculptural work and baubles and, well everything and needed a bit of a boost to my mojo; sooo, about a year ago I got in contact with a lovely lady who lives a very very long way away (well not the other side of the world, but the other end of the country and from here and that is a long way!) and who makes beautiful pieces in a different kind of glass from the kind I use.  The glass is called Borosilicate or Boro for short.  It is alot harder than the soft glass that I have been using and you can do all sort of exciting things with it (things that some people argue you can do with soft glass to an extent) but you need ALOT more heat to melt it.

I have been trying to get up North to visit this lady for about a year, but with one thing and another I just couldn't make it, until this week!  Today I should be at market, but after two days tuition and two days driving (just under 800 miles round trip, but worth every single mile!) I badly needed a rest, so here I am writing this and trying to focus my brain!

I have had the most amazing two days with this lovely, kind, hardworking, talented and wonderful teacher who wouldn't let me give up when I threw a 'I can't do it tantrum'!  If you want to see what she does have a look at her website A Flame with Desire. Not to say that working with Boro is necessarily hard (well of course it all depends on what you are trying to do and I don't want to put people off who might be thinking of having a go), but it really is very different, lots of techniques I thought I knew I almost had to relearn and you do need to get that glass HOT, REALLY HOT!  It has been an exciting two days and now the fun starts as I look to playing more with this great glass over the quiet months of winter so that next year (hopefully) I will be able to branch out more with this work.

Before I include photos of a few of the things I made this week, I also wanted to say a big thank you to the lovely owners of the fabulous B&B where I stayed Howe Farm.  They were so very kind and helpful, the room was lovely with fabulous views and the whole place was very comfortable.  I would strongly recommend it to anyone wanting to stay up in the Lake District. Here is the view from the B&B :) 

Not good photos I am afraid as the light today is bad, but judging by the forecast it isn't going to get much better so hopefully you can see these (I did make some other things, but either I really can't get decent photos or really they are techniques that need quite a bit more practice that I haven't included them ;).  The 'trees' are great fun to make, you can really get into the 'zone' making these, this is just a little one (rather reminiscent of some of the pruning we have been doing round here recently!).  I am very pleased with the marbles, the sparkly one is lovely (not normally my colour but I am pleased with it) and the flower implosion one I am very proud of; implosion is the name for the technique used to make it and I have tried to make these before with soft glass and failed, but I am very pleased with this one (not perfect but not a bad start, I shall definitely be making more of these). :)