Yesterday I blew glass again, making some larger pumpkins as well as some new color Christmas balls. I recently received my glass order from Sylvie at Colourfusion (in Ontario), and it included cobalt blue (opaque) and a light blue (opaque). The light blue with a cobalt stripe is really nice, as is the straight cobalt c-ball.

I also ordered and received a new 4in optic mold from Steinert Industries. This one is a beautiful ribbed mold that is closed on the bottom. My other molds are open bottom. The nice thing about a closed bottom is that it can be used for small or medium gathers equally well. This enabled me to make both small and medium pumpkins.

On Saturday’s session, the gathering port lid fell out of the steel frame as I was starting my second c-ball. It landed with a thump on the furnace. Although it cracked in half, it still covered the crucible. Thinking quickly (things are at 2000F) I was able to push the pieces together with my large tweezers and move the lid to where the steel support would fit and close. I was then able to adjust the attachment clamps to firmly hold the lid so I could finish the session. There was a bit of brick dust on the top of the molten glass, but I gathered it out easily on the next piece.

When I shut off the furnace later this week for maintenance, I will have to modify the lit to better fit the support.

As to the glass, the new bags of Spruce Pine are melting well. When I first received the order over a year ago August, the bags were rock hard and the batch had many hard lumps that would not break. For some reason, just sitting around in my shed for a year has resulted in batch that is still hard, but breaks up into nice batch with a single bag-drop onto concrete as is considered normal. The glass is also really for the entire pot. I do love melting Spruce Pine.

I’ll take some photos of the pumpkins and c-balls  later in the week and post them here.