You may recall that in my last post about the blue bowl, I stopped working on it as I was getting tired and started to make mistakes. One of the things that happened was the bowl slipped from my rubber gloves and hit the edge of the sink. A small chip occurred and I thought with the right amount of coldworking, I could eliminated it. Well, sadly the chip went too far into the surface and I don't want to cut down the diameter of the bowl that far. So I've decided to take another approach and the bowl is evolving.The top picture shows my latest idea. I'm going to take some of the curled stringers I made this past weekend and add them to the surface of the bowl. I like the contrast of the straight lines and these curly stringers. This is just my initial pass tonight and I want to search through the stringers I created to find the best ones suited for what I want to do next. I believe that fusing this piece again will eliminate the chip and provide a nice surface. Of course, this means that I will have to create another dam for the fusing process, to hold the glass at the 3/8" thickness it has now. I'll take a pre-fuse picture to show how this will work. And I will lose all of the coldworking efforts I have put into this piece, but I think that is ok because I should be able to salvage the piece and the accident may cause this to turn into a much more interesting end product! I hope.
I tried to take a picture of the offending chip. It doesn't show up very well, but the yellow arrow is pointing to it. It's an imperfection that is just unacceptable and I will hope my attempt at fusing again will remedy it.
I also took a picture of the edge after I had completed some of the coldworking. It's much smoother, and has started to take on a nice mat finish. I will still have to redo this after the fuse, but that's ok too. I had planned on a fire polish to shine things up after the coldworking anyway.So, as all of us have done, we learn from our mistakes and can sometimes turn them into something better. I certainly hope that will be the case for this blue bowl. I'm becoming rather fond of it. The more I look at it, I'm reminded of a beautiful blue planet with swirling clouds.
