Diary of a design
May 30,2021: I get a beautiful email from a client asking if I can design a memorial around the idea of bees. Reading her email, I instantly have a brilliant idea. I had been starting to chew on a bee themed design already but now I have an absolutely genius idea that I’m really excited about and say yes immediately.
- My idea is to make a bee sculpture and attach it to a hive sculpture. Ideally the bee is attached hot, glass fused to glass without adhesive, but I also want the bee to have good detail so it’s going to need to be flameworked and not made in the hot shop, so to start I am going to have to use different glass for the bee and as a result I know my first prototypes will have to be glued together. This isn’t how I normally work so I don’t know the details of how I’m going to do that but sort that out when I get there. Right now I have to make a hive sculpture and a bee.
- My brilliant idea for the hive: I am going to make hexagon honeycomb murinis and it is going to look so awesome. I don’t know exactly what shape to do for the sculpture; I will need to grind a little flat spot to accept a bee glued onto it without any of the flat area showing but am thinking something along the lines of the lumpy hive shape from the corn syrup logo because there will be no mistaking that, right?
- June: We have shut the furnace off and are waiting for it to cool down for maintenance so I have time to try making my wonderful little bee sculptures at the torch. I have spent hours examining photos of bees. Luckily I obsessively photograph them. Evonne Smulders’s honey bees are small and smooth, unlike the furry bumble bees that frequent my garden. This is good because glass is smooth. I don’t know how I would make a glass bee look fluffy. I note the proportions, the colours, how they hold their wings, the shape of their faces, their colour patterns. I will have to wait for the furnace to be hot again before I can start working on the hive part.
- I am in the studio and start my first bee. Because this is practice, I use light purple glass which is inexpensive and I have a lot of it. Black of course because I need to see the pattern or it won’t read bee. I get the basic steps pretty quickly (I have already run through it in my head a million times) but it is apparent that I need to practice. Like, a lot. The details are quick to melt, the wings are a struggle, half of them blow up. Everything I make today is shit but that’s OK, I will look at them tomorrow and adjust what I am doing.
- I need to figure out the colours for my bee. I spend a whole day searching bead glass suppliers’ websites looking at their yellows, blacks, and browns. It’s tricky, I want the colours to be realistic-ish, and not be cutesy-cartoonish and most of the yellows are too bright. Moretti’s medium and light topazes will probably work, and CIM makes a fantastic really dark brown. I hope they fit*. In theory Moretti and CIM are supposed to fit with each other but in reality the two brands don’t always play well together and can crack. I don’t order them today, I want to practice some more.
- I am back at the torch practicing. It’s still a struggle. I am starting to get the hang of the stripe pattern. I make one bee with a fantastic face but then transfer it on the wrong side so I have to put the wings on its stomach and its head ends up upside down. And then the wings break off when I knock it into the annealer. I’m going to have to figure out a gentler way to knock them off. I wonder if stiff borosilicate glass would work better, hold its shape and not break? I pull out some boro rods and choose the cheapest colours to experiment with. Boro is a lot more expensive than the soft glass. They still all look like shit. It’s clear I am going to have to spend many, many more hours practicing before I get a good one. I have spent another whole day on this. I go home and look on the internet for topaz and very dark brown in borosilicate. None of the manufacturers make the colours I want.
- Every time I drop one of my test bees its wings break off. I don’t want my designs to be this breakable.
- July: The furnace is hot and we are back to blowing just in time for the start of the heat wave. I clear some time in my blowing schedule to pull the honeycomb cane. It does not go well. Shaping the hexagon by hand does not get the shape sharp enough for the corners to hold up to the heat necessary for pulling. I compromise on the heat and the cane pulls short and fat with roundish corners. Not what I need. I need a murini mold. That evening and the next day I spend hours searching glass tool websites looking for a hexagon mold. I find one but it is for bead making and is not big enough. I need to think on this problem.
- I have decided that instead of hexagon murini I am going to draw hexagons into gold glass powder, making dents with a butter knife and melting the surface smooth capturing the shapes. It works but the shapes are very distorted and it is clear I need a tool; a hexagon stamp of some kind. After my first hive sculpture is put away, I have the brilliant thought that instead of a bee sculpture, I should do a cane drawing of a bee on the surface of the hive, hot, so I pull out some black cane and my torch and try another one. The bee looks like a housefly that got run over by a rototiller. This isn’t going to work. I make some orders so I can get paid. When I go home I tell my partner Chris about my tool idea and sit at my computer until midnight searching metal suppliers, trying to find some kind of steel hexagon tubing that will work for me. I don’t find anything.
- The next day when I come home after work Chris has found brass hexagon beads on Etsy that he says will work for my stamp but because they are brass they will have to be silver soldered instead of welded so there is a question of how well it will hold up to heat. I place an order for the beads.
- The brass beads arrive by the end of the month even though they were drop shipped from China. They are perfect. Chris spends the whole next day making me two stamps- one with a single hexagon and another that looks like a honeycomb cereal piece.
- I have order deadlines so I have to wait another week to give the stamps a try. They are a massive improvement over the butter knife but I’m still getting a lot of distortion. I need a whole marver (big flat surface) of these hexagons that I can roll the surface of my glass on. When I get home I tell Chris what I need. It takes me another week to find time to figure out how many packages of brass beads I need and get my order placed. The good news is that the silver solder holds up just fine.
- I am talking to my studiomate Deanna as she blows glass about my problem with the bees. I want the bee to be kind of realistic and not cartoon-y, how do I do this? As I’m talking I think about how she does some work with decals and they are sepia coloured and an image forms in my head with the honey-gold hive with a sepia coloured drawing of a bee on it. Deanna agrees to help me with this. That night when I get home I look at all my bee photos again and make a pencil drawing of a bee which I give to Deanna the next time I see her.
- I make a couple more hive sculptures, bumpy still but a little less so as Deanna says the decals work best on a flatter surface. The following week I grind the bottoms so they’ll sit up in the kiln and give them to Deanna to do some tests with the decals she has made from my drawing.
- Mid-August: I am still waiting for my 2nd order of hexagon beads. They are taking longer than the first order, but the world shipping crisis is still in full swing so what can ya do? Also, there is a forest fire one exit away from my home down the highway, we can see it from in front of my place and all the neighbours come over with beverages to watch. The smoke, and the airplanes, and the helicopters.
- Deanna’s decal tests are promising. The decals look great although the sculptures slumped a bit during the firing process. If I am going to do this process I will have to resolve this issue. Also, Deanna’s kiln is really large and if I am going to keep having her do the firings I will have to wait until she has a full kiln of projects needing the same temperature program so this is going to get complicated in relation to my memorial order target turnaround timelines. I also have to revisit the shape of my hive sculptures. These ones all look like turds.
- September: Great news! My friend Susan is selling her tiny test kiln. It fits two pieces. If I can find a controller for it and find a place to keep it I will buy it so I don’t have to wait on Deanna’s kiln schedule. But the manufacturer of the controller I want is not returning my phone calls or emails. I also don’t know where I could put it. It’s heavier than I expected. And I seriously have no place for it.
- The brass hexagon beads have finally arrived. Chris spends about 30 metal shop hours making my brass honeycomb marver and only burns his fingers a little bit. It is a spectacular object.
- October: What if I make a round sphere, cut a window facet in it for a place for the bee drawing, and can I pick it up and fire the decal on in the glory hole? Will the decal hold up to this kind of heat application? I make a number of spheres to do tests with. My honeycomb marver works perfectly. I have to get all my galleries supplied with their Christmas inventory by the end of October. I send the honeybee client an update.
- November: I do my first test in a half-hot glory hole. I pick it up OK but when I grab it with my glove to put it away it blows up. Two days later when it has cooled, the decal wipes off; I didn’t get it hot enough. Now I know. I try again the next week. And again and again and again. Everything blows up. But I still think I’m on to something, if I can just get this to work then I don’t have to buy Susan’s kiln and figure out where it’s going to live. I’m also brainstorming different shapes. Deanna suggests my standing stone shape with lots of extra gloobs to look like a wild hive, and I also have an idea for a standing circle shape. I make some blanks. I don’t know how I would set up the standing stone shape in the kiln for pickup. The circle I think I can do. The kiln program takes 12 hours so when I want to do a pick up it takes some planning and co-ordinating the day before my blowing slot.
- The kiln controller manufacturer still won’t get back to me. I am really hoping I sort out the problems so that I can fire the decals without a kiln. There are also some decal application issues but I think I can solve this. I signed up for one Christmas craft show in Calgary but have not had time to prep for it so I am just taking whatever inventory I have. A two-day show takes me away from the hot shop for over a week. Reps are emailing and phoning me with last-minute panic orders they need for Christmas. I have nothing in stock for them. I do my best.
- December: we have decided to drain and turn the furnace down so we can all take a break over the holidays. I am scrambling to get orders completed that clients are hoping to get for Christmas gifts. I email my honey bee client to check in with my progress and let her know I’m still working on this; in my experience people usually lose interest if you don’t have something finished to show them within a month or so and this has taken about 7 months so far. She emails back wondering if could I make an acorn, or a bear? She has forwarded my photos to her sister and her sister emails that she loves my bee drawing idea. I send a photo of my bear sculpture. I spend about 15 minutes thinking about how I would make an acorn and make a good one on my first try during my next blowing slot - it comes together instantly. I use the single hexagon stamp Chris made to put the texture on the cap.
- January: Chris and I caught the Covid over the Christmas break so I am trapped in my home and my studiomates are scrambling to rearrange the blowing schedule to fill in the gaps I am leaving and let me make up some of my lost production time when I can return. I effectively lose the 1st two weeks of January but am able to get a bit of work on year-end financials, so there’s that, at least, I guess?
- I phone my colleagues Natali and Jill to pick their brains about my kiln program and decal application struggles and the three of us and sometimes Jill’s husband John talk decals and programs. They advise I need to try picking up the sphere at a higher temperature. I am keen to get back into the studio and give it a try, but am worried about getting marks on the surface of the piece from the higher temperature. By the end of the conversation Nat and I have been invited up to Edmonton for a private silkscreen workshop with John.
- I am back in the studio finally, I have so many orders in the queue but really want to try a pickup.
…Success! I have solved the decal application problem, and the pickup program that Nat and Jill suggested worked. The surface is not marking up from the higher temperature. One day I set up the circle but when I go to pick it up it has fallen flat in the kiln. I pick it up anyway and it works fine. I don’t like the sepia bee so much on this one though, but on the sphere it’s really nice.
- Nine months later I finally have a sample of a resolved and completed design to show my client. They love it and are also ordering an acorn. Whew.
*Fit: COE, Coefficiency of Expansion. Each formula of glass is a bit different and if you are using two colours together touching they need to expand and contract at the same rate (coefficiency of expansion) or else your piece cracks. Manufacturers do their best to formulate their glass in the same line to have the same COE, and the different manufacturers of the same kind of glass (soft, borosilicate…) will aim for the same COE so that their products can be used interchangeably but I find sometimes the pieces crack when I use certain CIM colours so it’s always a risk and tests need to be done to confirm compatibility.