The rings -- again!

Ok, so my final project isn't done. It's not even started. Those gorgeous blue rings are mocking me. I see the finished product in my head, but I can't get my hands to make it all work. I will taunt you all now with a picture of the rings in progress:


They are trying to come together, they really are. I'm almost there. If I can stay away form my torch tonight (HA!), I might get this show more on the road and have something to *really* look at in a few days.

More Bottle Cutter Madness

So my friend Jennie had a project that involved cutting bottles. She contacted me and asked if she could just tie a string soaked in kerosene to the bottle, light it, then douse it in ice water. Whoa! I said. Come to my house and try the bottle cutter first. Jennie loves fire, but she agreed to come by yesterday and give the cutter a shot.

There we were yesterday afternoon in the blistering heat, fumbling around with the bottle cutter. Remember the previous post? Yeah. That. At any rate, we decided that a combination of techniques would work. We scored the bottles on the cutter, then heated the score with a lighter and plunged it into ice water.

Voila! It worked! It worked really well. Sure, we had to do some minor tapping in places where the score wasn't deep enough, but we managed to cut up six bottles. Jennie got her project made, and I am all pumped up with several projects to work on. First of all, I need to send Christine the rest of my glass for the recycled project. I can't wait to see what she does with it!

Check out the cool guitar slides Jennie made!


The first one is the ceramic slide that we based them on. The other three are her blues guitar-playing friend's top three picks from the six we made. Sweet recycling!

Cutter = 0, Bottle = 2

I got my bottle cutter last week but I've been too busy to try it out. Then Saturday we had the remnants of hurricane Hanna blow through which kept me from going out to the studio. Fortunately, my husband was home for a couple of hours this afternoon so I finally got time to hit the studio. Boy, is that place a mess! I need a shop monkey!

I quickly cut a plate and got that going in the kiln. One day I'm going to have projects lined up to go into the kiln so I don't waste precious days with nothing to fire.

Anyway, once I reprogrammed the kiln and got it going, it was time to open the box with the cutter in it. It's a used cutter, but it appears to have all the bits and parts. Assembling it wasn't very intuitive, but eventually I figured it out and there it stood in all it's funky glory.

Fortunately, I have this lovely box of donated bottles to try it out on. The first thing I tried was a beer bottle, it cut really well, but I don't have a very even hand with it yet so the score went off at a crazy angle. I can grind it down to get a decent cup out of so I'm cool with that.

So then I tried it on the remnants of the blue bottle that gave up such cool rings. You can see a picture of them in the last post. I skipped an instruction. Wah!!!! Never skip an instruction. Of course, the score went off the line again. I think I can salvage it. Plus, I have a couple more blue bottles, but still - epic fail. When am I ever going to learn?

Oh well. I'm having fun, and that's the point of the whole excersize.