(2005) Smoked herring picnic and other fun things...

On Monday it was my instructor Charlie's last day teaching us (until after our study tour), so he brought all of us smoked herring for an after-class picnic/party. That's what the first picture is from. The crazy-looking guy with the white hair and with arm extended over head is Charlie. This was soooo much fun! And VERY tasty I must say. We all pitched in some moola to get stuff for a salad for the vegetarians and refreshments for all. The fish looked wicked just sitting on the table in front of me. Them' bones were wicked too, almost choked on a couple but I survived. In class this week, we've been learning about fusing glass. These are pictures of the stuff in the kiln before it was fired up, and the kiln at the end of the heating cycle. Opening that thing when it's that hot is SOOOOO HOT. We have to be really careful and it has to be opened slowly, that's the difficult part.


It's fun stuff and it has a lot of potential after we all know what we're doing. Right now, Charlie's just having us compose repeating patters, landscapes, or a bunch of randomness put together with sheets of colored glass. Everything is then put into a kiln for many hours and heated up to 850˚ C where it melts down to about 1/4" high, no matter how many sheets you have on top of eachother. It flows out everywhere. A couple of my things have turned out but others have not. I'll show them later. Today we met one of the fellas that will be guiding us on our study tour, his name is Ole Victor and he was a student of Charlie's at one point. I wish Charlie would be coming with us too, but he has to go to his studio on Bornholm and work unfortunately. His son, Erik will be guiding us as well. Ole actually started out having his masters in aero/space engineering, then he went on to become a ceramist (or is it ceramacist? A potter, rather) and THEN went on to get an education in glass with Charlie. His stuff is very impressive. He showed us all slides of his work, Charlie's work cuz Charlie's too modest to show us anything of his own which is also very impressive, and some of Erik's work. This study tour will be so intense and so exciting. Tomorrow we leave at 9 a.m. and ride a bus to where Ole has his school and workshop. He told us that we're going to have our first shot at blowing glass tomorrow! We had no idea this was in store for us! I'll let you know how it goes :) After we leave that city (I can't remember the name of the city, sorry) we drive all the way to Stockholm where we'll be staying in a youth hostel for a few days, visiting workshops, studios, factories, and all of the like. When we leave Stockholm, we'll be traveling on an overnight cruise ship to Helsinki! That alone is amazing. I think they said this ship holds around 5000 passengers. Maybe that's not that huge, but I don't know what the norm is when it comes to cruise ships. I feel like that's a lot. They also told us there's like 3 clubs on it or something...? It has to be fairly large if it has that I would think. Anywhoooo, when we're done in Helsinki we'll be flying back which we were told takes all of 40 minutes. I thought that was funny. It feels like a super long trip, but we really won't be that far away from here. I babble too much, I gotta keep this at a tolerable length otherwise everyone will lose interest reading these things. Hahaha. So I'm excited to leave tomorrow! Not sure how much internet access I'll be having on the trip so it may be a while until you hear from me again. I'll leave you with this:

This is Ben, he's in my class. He's done this before and he's been making some really cool glass beads and other awesome things. I think I'm going to try to buy one from him! Tah-tah.