Glass Reflections

A yard sale find, a couple of years ago.... $0.25, yes, 25 cents, a real bargain. 

Daum egg-shaped decorative paperweight, signed, made in France. Daum Glass is made in Nancy, the history of the company is here.

Window Works

I've been a very lazy blogger recently.... my excuses are totally pathetic. Christmas, New Year, and the horrible COLD weather intervened with my creative thought processes, such as they are. I've been attending ice hockey games and practices, some medical appointments, and just generally being a lazy good-for-nothing so-and-so, as my mother would say.
So now, back to blogging, fire up the synapses, it's Twentyeighteen!

When OlderSon and The Equestrienne bought their house a few years ago, her dad built some cupboards either side of the fireplace. And I decided to make some stained glass windows.

Can you guess, she's a horse person?

Some More Chihuly

A few more pictures from the Royal Ontario Museum's Chihuly Exhibit.

Persian Ceiling  This is one of the most popular works. Brightly coloured "persian" shapes are arranged in layers on a ceiling of glass, and lit from above. When Chihuly was asked why he called these shapes "persian" he said he just liked the name. But the Museum removed the quote from it's signage, and to see why, click here.

The whole room glows with colour forming dramatic textured reflections on the walls. Apparently the SoHo Metropolitan Hotel in Toronto has a ceiling like this in the front entrance, but on a smaller scale. I'll have to check it out when I'm in the neighbourhood. 

The best way to see the colours of the Persian Ceiling is to lie on the strategically provided upholstered cushions. This family was enjoying bathing in a pool of light, pointing out all the tiny details..

Fire Orange Baskets  A depiction of Northwest Coast Indian baskets showing the shapes in the circular woven baskets created by effects of gravity and time.

These glass baskets are the largest ever produced.

Persian Trellis  More of those "persian" shapes. The glass is blown to form herringbone patterns, and each individual piece has a slightly different colour combination, with a teeny weeny stripe of contrasting glass on the rim. I want one!!!!

Perhaps you would like to take home a souvenir of your visit to the Chihuly exhibit? These modest little trinkets were displayed for sale, carefully watched over by a Museum employee,  and in fact one had been purchased just a few minutes before I took this photo. 

Too bad I didn't have any spare change with me, as I quite fancied this lovely bowl of sunshine sitting on my mantlepiece. But I would have had to take it home on the bus..... and it might have been broken....

Chihuly

Well, one of my 2017 thoughts was to blog more, and, of course, I haven't so far! Total failure. Boo.
However, last week I spent an afternoon at the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) in Toronto, to catch the final week of the Chihuly Exhibition.
Dale Chihuly is an American glass sculptor, and his huge colourful creations are considered unique in the field of blown glass.
Is it art? He no longer blows the glass himself. His pieces are created by a team of master glassblowers and assistants under his direction in a huge studio workshop, and he has had exhibitions and large scale installations in many cities around the world, often showing similar forms and shapes. It's definitely an industry of excess.
Not everyone thinks that Chihuly glass belongs in the museum. The Toronto Star definitely agrees.
However, the pieces on display were memorable, full of light and colour and form. I couldn't help myself clicking the camera over and over.

Float Boat

Ikebana Boat

Icicle Chandeliers and Towers. Hundreds of pieces of blown glass are assembled around sturdy steel frameworks, and lit from external sources.  All displayed on a black perspex floor to enhance the reflections.

Laguna Torcello. Stroll around this intricate garden of glass and enjoy the flowers and organic shapes. This installation includes floats, reeds, crystals, and white belugas.

It looks like an underwater scene.

On looking closely, there are sea urchins, octopus, fish, crabs, seashells, seaweed.... on a lagoon island in Venice, one of  the sculptors favourite places.

Sapphire Neon Tumbleweeds 2016.  Featuring large bundles of linear factory made tubes that were heated and bent to curvilinear shapes, these Tumbleweeds resemble plant forms or even diagrams of atoms. 

Jerusalem Cylinders.  Pre-formed glass elements in the shape of sharp edged crystals are fused to cylindrical vessels, evoking the massive stones making up the walls of the Citadel in Jerusalem.

Red Reeds on Logs.  Glass reeds are presented on Ontario birch logs. Some of the reeds are 3 metres long, the glassblowers achieving this by pulling the hot molten glass downwards from a mechanical lift.

Spiked crystal tower of stalactites and stalagmites.

How do you move an installation like this from one city to another? Carefully, that's how.
This exhibition contains thousands of pieces of glass, each one fitted in it's individual cushioned heavy gauge cardboard container, and then loaded onto six 52' transport trucks filled from floor to roof.
More pictures to come.....

Shadow

My living room window used to look out on an empty lot overgrown with wild cherry trees... so pretty in the spring.... but the land was sold for a new house to be built about six years ago, and since then, this has been my view.

Another reason to be glad I am moving.

A Little Ray of Sunshine

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The sun is low on the horizon, shining through jewelled glass.

Digging Out

We certainly got dumped on today! About 30cm of snow, the light fluffy kind. It stuck to my kitchen window. It blew off the roof. It blew down my neck. It filled the driveway.

I'm lucky to have a friendly neighbour with a new toy.... a snow blower. It took less than 15 minutes to clear the drive, a task that would have taken a couple of hours of hard labour by snow shovel.

And as I wasn't going to risk venturing out on the snowy roads during the height of the storm, I decided make myself useful by starting on the Christmas decorations.

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Ahhh... snow falling softly outside, decorated tree inside..... now I'm starting to feel really Christmassy!

If you look closely, you'll see that Santa Claus has already left a giant bottle of wine under the tree. Three cheers for good old Santa!

Looking out

The view through my dining room window.

The sun always shines through these old stained glass windows, no matter what the weather.

Lucky Stars

TA-DAAA!!

The lucky winner of my 100th BlogPost Commemmorative Giveaway has been named using a foolproof selection method! Twentyfour names of lovely Blogsters who left comments on my 100th post were put into my Red Hat Lady hat and The Space Cadet closed his eyes, counted to ten, muddled them all up and the Blogger name he came up with was.....

HOORAY and Congratulations to

OldOldLady of the Hills in L.A.

Your prize is a lovely glass suncatcher star... in fact I think it's a Lucky Star! Your choice of colour. Let me know your address and it will be in the mail quick as a flash!

Wasn't it Louis Armstrong who sang....

You are my Lucky Star

I saw you from afar...

Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend

In this case, diamonds definitely are a girl AND a boy's best friend. I've made this glass panel to be a prize at No2Son and his Beloved's Jack'n'Jill party.

This will be a pre-wedding fundraiser in September.... a sort of wedding shower plus party featuring yummy food and drink, dancing to a DJ, prezzies, raffles, games, maybe a silent auction. Everyone is invited from both the groom's and the bride's families, plus next door neighbours, school and Uni friends, quite possibly anyone they have come in contact with in the past 25 years!. Party Time!!

Reflection

Winter streetscape through my window reflected in the bookcase. The stained glass is over 100 years old, the bookcase a mere 15 years.

The Three Hares

The symbol of The Three Hares is a mysterious emblem that has been known for more than 1,500 years, and has been found in many parts of the world in Christian, Buddhist and Islamic cultures. Its origin or meaning has been lost through the centuries.
Three hares are chasing one another in an everlasting circle. They share between them three ears which form a triangle in the center of the design, yet each animal has two ears. You can read more here and here and listen to a BBC radio programme about it here.

I've wanted to make a stained glass panel using this ancient symbol ever since I first came across it.
Here are my tools and materials:

And here's the finished product. I didn't have enough of the blue glass so I used green instead.