Total Art Soul - for artists

So there I am Saturday, happily torching along, hubby is down in the basement doing some woodworking, I go to put the 10th bead in the kiln and I notice that the temp is only 830, garaging temp is around 960.  The temp is continuing to drop, I panic and turn the kiln off and then back on hoping that it was just a fluke.  Nope, temp is still dropping, what to do now. 

 I called the company where I got the kiln and luckily it's still under warranty so they are sending the part, apparently the elements went out.  So, here I sit.  Probably all week with my luck.  What to do with my time???  

The weather is beautiful today, we are suppose to have rain tomorrow so maybe today should be spring cleaning day.  I rarely leave the house, quite the hermit since I retired.  I promised hubby that we could go out for lunch tomorrow so today will have to be cleaning day.  

I'm starting to have serious withdrawals from torching, maybe I'll go out to YouTube and watch some torching videos...LOL  A little vicarious torching.  Notice how quickly I skipped the cleaning...my bad.

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Finally a beautiful spring day in the south, I can't wait to get to the torch today, just waiting for it to warm up a bit.  I've been kind of out of sorts lately, most likely spring fever but who knows.  I get down to the torch and don't know what to do so I just melt glass and when I do that I usually end up with just a lot of mess.   The good news is that I now have a resource for the messes, I have a friend who does mosaics and she uses the "ugly" beads in her mosaics.  God love her, she thinks they are wonderful...LOL

I go to the Lampwork Etc. forum each day and check out the gallery for inspiration, a few days ago someone had posted a thread on tube beads.  Everyone was posting photos of their tube beads, long lean beautiful cleanly done beads.  I had not, up to that point, tried tube beads.  So, I decided to challenge myself to make four tube beads.  Here is one of the tube beads I made.  I was really pleased with what I made.  I tried to stay simple at first with pure color and just a bit of highly silvered glass wrapped around the center, it has been reduced to show the wonderful metallic sheen that is silvered glass.  

 These two beads have sent me in a new direction, to discover what glass colors I can work with that won't "fume" from the silvered glass when it's reduced.  Fuming can totally change the color of the base bead and not for the good usually.  Sometimes there is a happy accident, I'll show you one of those tomorrow, but I digress...this new direction has forced me to use some of those "designer" glasses that I have been saving for "special".  You know, that day that never comes, the day when you decide to finally use the expensive stuff and actually decide you either love it or hate it.  At this point I hope I hate it, some of it is so expensive.  

 So, today at the torch I'm going to try five new colors that I haven't ever used before, and of course try them with silver glass to see if they discolor.  That was the real purpose, right?  LOL  See how easy it is for me to take a different road.  I'm so lost now I don't remember how I got here.  

Enjoy your day and remember to stop along the journey and enjoy where you are and how you got there.

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This has taken up my time for the last 24 hours so I thought I would share it with you here.  I kind of has to do with Total Art Soul because I was missing posts.  Anyway, my husband's email address is on my sub account and we were having trouble with me being able to send him an email.  So, I called AT&T to see if they could figure it out. 

They had me open a browser and log onto my online email, low and behold there was a Spam folder there full of all kinds of emails that it percieved as spam.  Now these were from people that I had been emailing forever and was receiving email from on a daily basis.  Even my Google Calendar which sends me an email on a daily basis was only coming to me every three or four days.  There is clearly something wrong with their spam filtering.  For now I have turned off the spam filtering at the server.  

 I get emails when there are posts to threads on Total Art Soul that I have subscribed to.  Some would come in and some would go to the spam folder.  My poor mother, I had accused her of sending emails to me at my old job's email address when there they were over twenty emails from her.   I could go on and on but you get the idea.  When hubby logged onto to his online email we found my emails to him, in his spam folder.  Can you even believe that, the thing is clearly broken if it thinks that an email from itself is broken.   

 So, if you have AT&T as your ISP you might want to log on to your email at AT&T and turn off the spam filter.  It's not working...LOL  

 For now and maybe forever I will just delete or bounce what I perceive as spam. I can trust me...

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