Jelly glass

I don't mean jelly glasses as in glasses for jelly, but playing with jelly as you might with kiln-formed colours. These are stripes of jelly (not packet) set within hollowed-out oranges. Then cut in quarters longways. A pretty effect. You could do this with glass -- one technique being hot and the other cold. Which is easier to control or predict? I'm not sure. Another seasonal deployment of creativity. Should I be getting back to my sketchbook?

6 glasses each on Christmas Day

In addition to the 4 shown on the table were champagne glasses and jelly glasses for the kumquats in orange brandy. What a pleasure to have all the right kit for a festive table. Also visible is a slumped glass plate decorated with orchids (centrepiece) and white asparagus wrapped in smoked salmon ribbons. The coup de grace was also in an asparagus form -- ice cream pressed into 19th century pewter moulds, with perfect green tips.

For the last 2 weeks all creativity has gone into Christmas. I even based my Christmas card on the cube project.

2nd Floor space

Today I went to see the venue for my 'location-specific project'. This is it. The view is from the lift looking straight ahead and I have my eye on the window furthest to the right of the group of 4. It is inset by about 11 cm so I could trap something within a double-glazed panel. That neatly solves my health and safety problems. The offices will be open plan, so if I use the full height, it will be seen from all offices.

Disheartening term end

Here I am at the weekend wondering what to do with a bunch of cubes. Realise I have been putting energy into objects I don't want and can't find space for. Yes, it was all about learning, but the way the term fizzled out felt a bit like slow-cooking a complex dish, putting it out on a carefully laid table -- and then no one came to eat it.

Wasted day

No pix of my 'assessment display' because I've shot them on the internal memory of my camera and have no idea how to transfer them. Anyway, what a farce! Each of us went through a charade of presenting our work to the tutors while the other students sat in the canteen twiddling their thumbs. An entire day of nothing achieved and nothing learned while next door the potters were happily potting, with no need to do all this ludicrous form-filling. At least if we had all listened to each other's spiel about our work, that would have been worth-while, but yesterday was costly both in emotional energy and in extra (and unnecessary) expenditure. Do we get to assess the way the course is run, I wonder?

Cut, opened out and slumped

Here are 3 more versions of the cube: cut across to make two hexagons, which I have reshaped, engraved and glued side by side. The middle one represents the solid opened out into its component slices and copper-foiled - the mottled effect is created by sandblasting the back of a mirror. The 'bra cup' shape is what happened when I allowed a cast cube to slump by itself.

Still floating

Next Thursday is our assessment day and the end of the cube project -- hurrah! But actually, after a bored patch, I started to enjoy it again. Even now I don't feel I have squeezed everything I could out of it. There's a lot you can do with float glass. I am still hoping, for instance, to do something out of white float, but the bit I have ordered hasn't arrived yet. I nevertheless have 10 pieces to show (5 requested). None are beautifully finished, but I now know what I should have done to improve them. If our group had been allotted lead glass instead of float, I think I would have gone the extra mile and spent time on hand-finishing a perfect cube because of the optical illusions one could then get by engraving one, or maybe two, sides.