Creative Dreaming

Buen dia!

I cannot believe this weather. Never have we had an April or May like this since we have been here. When I go for my 5am walk, the temperature is hovering around 58 degrees. The days warm up into the 80's, there are steady breezes, often slightly overcast days. I should be sweating hot bullets by now and I should have been in my shorts back in April, very uncommon stuff going on. And it is not, I repeat, not humid, and that is probably the most unique aspect of this weather. 

We are enjoying it while we have it.

I have taken advantage of the cooler weather and fired my kiln over and over. I am supposed to be making the windows for our bedroom and bathroom. I am firing 8x10 fused glass transparent panels that will then go into iron frames. But I got distracted and decided to make wind chimes instead. 

Here are four of the wind chimes I put together in April and May. I have a total of eight now and made the mistake of using up too much glass.

 So, the window panes are on hold now until we go to the states in June and I can resupply.

I just have a terrible, terrible glass habit. 

I thought about firing the beer bottles that party people leave in the streets and I have done that before,the blue Sky vodka bottles fire really well, but instead I got out my lampworking boxes.

Lamp working, if you don't know, is basically heating glass rods in a hot torch and then hopefully turning the result into something that is either pretty to look at or useful in some way or other.

If you have been to FAOT, there is a sweet little man in a booth on the street who has a nice torch and he uses white glass rods, then paints them with acrylics and fires them in his torch, turning them into animals, birds, boats, all kinds of stuff. At the local mall in the states, you have probably seen it. Swans are big with those artisans.

So, I am kinda doing that, but with colored glass rods and no paint.

But I am not into swans or other creatures. I am not even into making glass beads which is what most lamp workers create.   I don't really know what I will be making. I spent 2 hours pulling what is called stringers, very thin, long pieces of glass that are used for decoration. I just do not know what I will decorate.

This lamp working requires equipment and tools. I brought to Alamos most of my stuff, regulators, flash arrestors, a minor Nortel torch, hundreds of glass rods and all kinds of cool tools to shape glass with.

 Getting an oxygen and propane tank proposed the biggest problem

A friend in Alamos gave me a small oxygen tank and Senor bought me a small propane tank and helped me set up everything. The oxygen tank actually had oxygen in it, so that's when I took advantage and pulled stringer. Then, poof, it was all used up.

There is a hardware store in Alamos that sells oxygen bottles and acetylene and propane, and other gasses, all used mostly by the hundreds of talented iron workers here in Alamos. I attempted to get the small tank filled and quickly discovered that the oxygen for an empty tank comes from Guaymas and can take a month to get here. I am not allowed to transport the tank inside a car. Imagine that! And they are very, very strict. And it was costly to buy a large filled oxygen tank.

I ended up asking an iron worker friend to go to the hardware store and buy it for me. It didn't cost him as much as it would cost a gringa and he had a truck in which to transport it.

So, here I am, at the end of the portal, with all this set up and no idea what I want to make.

This is not really any kind of dilemma.

 And I am in no hurry.

 I actually hoped that writing about it might suddenly give me a brain 'pop' and I would then say, oh, that's what I want to make. 

But, that did not happen. 

I am hoping to have a creative dream tonight. 

Sometimes, but not often, that happens to me and I can see what I will be making. 

It was in a dream that I saw our bedroom windows, with the early morning sunlight streaming through the colorful glass.

I also saw a wind chime in a dream, but it wasn't made out of glass. 

It was made out of copper nuts and bolts and hanging from a wooden toilet seat.

 Not too odd, because that dream came after hours of following Senor around Home Depot in Obregon.

 He bought a lot of copper nuts and bolts and tubing, but not a toilet seat.

 I hope you are having as great a day as I am, and as always,

Que le vaya bien!

Linda Lou