So Elodie and I are here for our annual trek in Philly for the BMAC (Buyers Market of American Craft) show tomorrow starting  February 16-19 at the Philadelphia Convention Center. We arrived on Wednesday night and spent the last 2 days setting up the show, eating unusual food (for us) and drinking some fantastic German bier and eating great food at at place called Brauhaus Schmitz tonight and checking out the sights in Philly on South Street. Yoo, Hey whatch u doin back in Santa Fe?

Raffle Winner Carol Rose

Our 12th annual Holiday Tour came to a close yesterday afternoon. Congratulations to  Carol Rose as our raffle winner! Thanks to all for participating in this year’s show, and to all who came out to support the arts in Santa Fe!

Liquid Light Glass will be continuing the gallery sale items until Christmas Eve! Glass is discounted 15% – 50%! Don’t forget we have Gift Certificates too! Great for art, or Glass Experience classes!

How about giving your our own handmade glass gifts for the holidays! Liquid Light Glass will be offering walk-in paperweight, ornament, and flower making! Come on in- choose your own colors and start forming hot glass into beauty!  All items made will be ready to take home the next day!

Liquid Light Glass represents these artists: Jannine Cabossel, blown glass Wabi Sabi and Keihatsu vases, and more; Marcy Albin, etched designs in goblets; Cia Friedrich, blown glass sculptures; John Marks, blown glass cups and Chimayo Hearts.

We will be hosting additional artists that will be selling glass, fine jewelry and ceramics: Kristin Lora, fine metalsmith and jeweler; J9 Glass, flame worked sculptural jewelry; Ezri Horne, ceramics; and Patrice Jaguirreberry, flint knapped blades. Patrice will be doing knapping demonstrations on Saturday. There will also be glassblowing demos all three days!

All of Baca Street will be open and celebrating the holidays! Join us!

“Apiary Assemblage” – Glass: blown, sculpted, flame-worked, and fused murrine. 24h x 60 x 12″

Glass Alliance New Mexico (GANM) and Mill Fine Art have announced recipients of the Glass Invitational Awards for 2012.   Announcements took place during the Opening of the exhibit and after the keynote lecture by Marvin Lipofsky on Friday evening.

The 2012 Best In Show Award went to Red Shift by Santa Fe glass artist Harry Pollitt.  The three Jurors Recognition Awards went to Elodie Holmes, Laura Robbins and Deborah Klezmer for ‘Apiary Assemblage’, ‘Night House’, and ‘Not To Be Taken’, respectively.  Honorable Mention awards were presented by jurors Kate Elliott and Verne Stanford to Wesley Carr, Karen Bexfield.

‘Worker Bee Girls and Their Garden Tools’ offhand sculpted and blown glass, flameworked parts, and pastorali fused glass. Elodie Holmes 2012. Photo credit Wendy McEahern Photography.

Here is a sneak peek at the first of my new sculptural series on humankind’s smallest domestic animal and superorganism- Apis mellifera or “honey-carrying bee”. What started out as an experiment in making a glass honey comb using a murrine technique, has blossomed (ha!) into an artistic exploration of the bee world. I just can’t help myself! They are incredible! And some of the imagery is perfect for glass. The impressive geometry of the honeycomb, flowing honey, and certain bee behavior are just a few of my inspirations.

Jannine and I have a hive on our property, and are getting another one May 1st. Jannine keeps enlarging the garden, so we thought that by supporting a hive, the bees would have plenty to pollinate. Jannine’s giant pumpkin blossoms were a big hit for the bees last season! We are learning so much about them. I think of my new series as a way to reach out and educate more people about the importance of the bee hive collective. As Jurgen Tautz states in his book, ‘The Buzz about Bees’, “For modern man, bees serve not only as essential coworkers in agriculture,  but as indicators of the state of the environment, and witness of an intact association between humankind and nature.”  More to come…

My furnace is 11 years old this month and is in wonderful shape. We did a major repair about 3 or 4 years ago, and it just keeps on going! Patrick is an expert designer and builder of glass equipment. I consider him New Mexico’s greatest glass community asset!

Cia inside the furnace

After Patrick used an angle grinder on all the trouble spots, Cia climbed into the furnace with some high temperature refractory castable material and patched some holes and cracks.

Cia still inside the furnace

We then replaced all the pots to evaluate their fit, made some adjustments, removed them, then lifted the large pot to repair the pedestal underneath it.

fixing the pedestal with castable

Here is the final arrangement of all the crucibles in the furnace. When the furnace is on, it is harder to see them at 2100 degrees!

The crucibles put back in place

The large crucible is for the clear glass, and the three in front are for my colored glass.

Flame on!

Yes! Success! The furnace will have a pilot flame over night with the door open, so the everything can warm up slowly, and allow the castable to dry. When I come in the morning, it should be only about 300 degrees. Then I will start making slow adjustments, bringing the furnace up approximately 100 degrees an hour- hopefully getting to around 1200 degrees by the end of the day. We should be charging the furnace with glass by Thursday, blowing by Friday.

In the mean time…

time for cleaning up...

scooping the glass from the furnace

On Friday after finishing some orders, John and Jannine helped me drag glass from the pots in the furnace. The glass that we dump from the pots goes into a bucket to be reused when the furnace gets hot again.

saving the glass in a bucket to remelt later

Patrick came in later to help tip the big crucible. This pot is 24 inches in diameter, 15 inches high, and about 200 pounds. From normal overflow and spillage of hot glass, the crucible becomes fused to the pedestal that keeps it off the floor of the furnace. We use a 2 inch pipe that’s about 7 feet long to pry it up, giving us good leverage and distance from the heat. At the same time, I slip a long piece of metal through the drain door in front of the furnace and position it under the pot. That way, when we release the pry bar, it rests on the metal, preventing the crucible from fusing to the pedestal again (allowing us to rearrange the pots when the furnace is cool enough on Monday).

Then the part that I hate doing- I shut off the power to the furnace. It is always a little unnerving to me because the furnace is like the heartbeat of the studio. It stays on 24/7, and now it is quiet. Sigh. The good news is that we should only have minor repairs to do before relighting. Our goal is to repair on Monday, let it dry overnight, then relight on Tuesday. It will take 3 days to get hot enough to charge the furnace with glass again. We should be blowing again by Friday or Saturday.

It will take another 3 days to heat the furnace back to charging temperature (2425 degrees). We hope to do that by Thursday, because we have a paperweight class on Saturday. Whew! I have my work cut out for me this week! I’ll keep you all posted on the progress…

2012 BMAC Booth

Every year for the past 16 years I have participated in the annual Buyers Market of American Craft in Philadelphia, PA. The Buyers Market of American Craft is the nation’s largest wholesale craft trade show. The Buyers Market offers artists the opportunity to create long-term business relationships with more than 3,000 galleries throughout the United States and Canada. This show is one of my main marketing tools every year.

Last year I blogged our daily progress getting to the show, but this year I was too tired at the end of the day. So here I’ve summed it up now that we are back in Santa Fe and I’m recovered!

The first thing we do is make all the glass art and ship it. Hargrove exhibitor services handles all the shipping. We put all the glass art into barrels and boxes, then strap it down to pallets. Hargrove sends a truck to my shop to pick-up the pallets, and then the pallets are delivered directly to my booth. This way I don’t have to worry about boxes getting lost or damaged. The other advantage is that my pallets are the first to arrive in my booth before all the other types of shipments. We shipped the work about two weeks before the show on February 3rd. I’d like to thank Jannine, Marcy, Cia and John for all their help in getting everything ready for the show!

Marcy's over-achieving packing techniques...

Everyone helps to strap down the barrels- or are they goofing-off?

stacking the pallets with the barrels and boxes. (Jannine looks tangled up in straps!)

Marcy borrowed a pallet jack from our Goodwater neighbors across the street...

much easier to move the pallets!

the truck has finally arrived to ship the pallets!

off to the show!

Jannine and I left for Philadelphia on the 15th. Thursday the 16th is our first day to set-up. We are always a little anxious to see if everything arrives safely!

Everything arrived safely at the booth!

1st the drapes go up

then the lights

then the pedestals are assembled

Elodie is inside the crate handing down lids for the pedestals

a welcome hidden surprise from Marcy and Cia!

Day 1 set-up took us to around 6pm. We always get the booth all set-up so all we have to do the next day is put out the glass and adjust the lights.

day 2- the glass comes out!

some other booths haven't even begun yet! Time is running out!

almost done!

2:30 pm finished setting up! Now off to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see the Van Gogh show!

The Philadelphia Museum of Art always has a great show when we are there. This year is Vincent van Gogh, we’ve also seen Dali, Degas, and Modern Art.

Van Gogh Sunflowers

Then we went to the Franklin Institute to see the largest private collection of dinosaur bones!

a dinosaur and its shadow

T-Rex and Elodie!

dinosaur egg

After we left the Franklin Institute Jannine and I had a wonderful meal at a Spanish tapas restaurant called Tinto. The food in Philadelphia is amazing. It’s definitely one of the highlights in coming here!

The show opened on Saturday morning and closed on Monday. My daughter Flynn came for the weekend with Ronnie to help us out.

our beautiful assistant, Flynn

The show was successful! We took orders through July, and picked-up some new accounts. That’s what it’s all about! The final step is breaking down the booth. My wonderful brother Mark comes up from Maryland to help us take down the booth. It’s a hard job, but he makes it go fast! We were done in 4 hours- a show record for us!

packing up the show with my brother Mark and Jannine

flying home

On Tuesday morning we flew home to green chili and fresh mountain air! It sure is great living in New Mexico! Now it’s time to start filling those orders!

Jay Musler Bowl

The last month of 2011 ended as it started- very busy. My last entry was just before our annual Holiday Tour. It was a very successful show and so was the rest of December. It was a great ending to a good year. Many thanks to all our patrons and supporters of Liquid Light Glass. We hope that 2012 is even better!

The first event of the year was a Maestro Demo and slide show sponsored by Glass Alliance-New Mexico with San Francisco glass artist,  Jay Musler.  We had over 50 people at the demo! It was followed by a reception of his work at The William and Joseph Gallery on Canyon Road.

I met Jay back in 1981 while I was attending California College of Arts and Crafts. It was good to see him again and to meet his wonderful wife, Joan. Jay mostly flameworks his glass with torches and a lathe. Then he sandblasts and paints the glass to finish it. I just happened to have a small lathe in storage that he used for our demo. It was  much smaller than Jay was used to, so he was limited in what he could make- a small skull goblet. The slide show was next. It was an informative and beautiful look from Jay’s earliest work to the present. Thanks to Glass Alliance-NM, Jerry Silverstein, John Marks, Marcy Albin, Cia Friedrich, and Mary Bonney of The William and Joseph Gallery, for all your help in  making this another successful Maestro Demo at Liquid Light Glass!

Jay demos while Elodie watches