random thoughts – Day 2,405 (Friday 10/17) – breaking plans

Breakage on the design board.

The temperature was in the 40s and I dressed appropriately for a day out and about town in not too wintry gray pants and my current favorite gray patterned sweater. There were artist open studios in town and nearby in Ashburnham and Fitchburg, and I drank coffee and waited for it to be time to go.

Instead of sitting around idly, I started working on new glass pieces. There were more issues with a piece I’ve been fighting with and it was set aside. I decided to do a scrap work piece, but there weren’t enough scraps large enough and soon I was foraging for larger sheets to work from.

Ready to solder.

Suddenly, it was noon and the art thing was underway. Okay, no big deal, still plenty of time. Then it was 1:00, and I would leave after cutting “just one more piece of glass.”  And suddenly it was 2:00. Then 3:00. And that was the end of the day’s plan. So, I stayed home and kept working with the glass.

The new design was in red, orange, and yellow and today I learned that the yellow glass is the worst glass of all to cut (so far). It would score, then, instead of snapping on the score line, it would break on some wild other route and instead of having a strip to work from, I had a broken sheet of glass.

Partway through a rectangular design drawn earlier in the day, I decided it didn’t need to be confined by a box and changed the design. That meant some of the pieces needed to be larger to extend beyond the initial shape. Others needed to be adjusted to fit. Once it got going, it was fine, except for the part where my lower back was screaming because the dining room table is about 12-inches too low to be a suitable worktable.

The pieces were wrapped in copper foil, reset and anchored with pins, and soldered. At 8:30 I was finally done messing around with it and cleaned up. The craft room still isn’t set up, so I’ve been working out of the dining room and living room. Foiling and soldering tools are carried from the crafts room and set up in the living room, and then put back.

Overall, the house looks like a tornado hit it. The back yard is littered with siding, scaffolding, saw horses, and other construction stuff. Inside, the dining room table is buried under corkboards, containers of glass, a large corkboard with the large piece I’ve been avoiding working on and a smaller one for all the other stuff I’ve been doing. Boxes of glass and bevels are on the floor, creating an obstacle course. The chaos extends to the kitchen counter, which now holds the vase that used to be on the dining room table plus the old toaster oven. It’s feeling claustrophobic.

The hot mess and the angst it is generating may be exactly the kick in the pants needed to get the workroom set up. This will be less simple now that I know a taller and larger work table is needed.