Two and a half weeks to go until set up day and I just picked up the metal at Seaport Stainless. Made of 3/16” steel and Man is that thing heavy!!! I was going to have my friend Melissa Macdonald make an easel to hold the piece, but then Barry had the bright idea to order a ready-made easel. We found one on-line via US Art Supply and now we are wondering if it will be strong enough to hold 68 pounds of steel (yes, we brought out the scales!) plus about 15 pounds of glass. The easel arrives next week so we have some serous thinking to do… But the glass looks great on the steel backdrop!
 
In the meantime, I have worked on a center for the sunflower which I decided to cast in glass frit. Fibonnaci sequences conveniently set aside, I decided to approximate the amazing pattern of the sunflower seeds and not bother my pretty little head about sequences of 1,2,3,5,8,13 ad infinitum. Figuring out how to replicate spirals winding in opposite directions makes my head spin at this point. 
 
I cast the clay center in a plaster-silica mould and have filled it with glass frit (small particles of glass so that the lighter amber frit will be in the center and the darker rose-brown frit will be at the outside. I used a dark brown powdered glass for the very back layer and then some clear frit to fill in the gaps. The mould is now in the kiln and has passed the drying stage at 200 degrees F for 5 hours. It is now melting temperature a 1525 F and holding until the bubbles clear the surface. This is taking longer than I expected and I think I’m going to have to add some more glass to fill in where the bubbles are popping. Fingers crossed…

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This year, after having broken my hip in March, and just getting back to glass blowing at the end of August, I decided not to push things too hard and make a simple sunflower for the Autumn Lights Festival. How hard can it be to blow some large glass petals, affix them together with Magic Sculpt (my new favourite material and glass artist's helper) and mount them on a laser cut steel background? I envision it as a painting set on an easel on the hill in the Mediterranean garden. Simple, but with good visual impact.

I've also decided to make three new Love Lillies to replace some that were purchased by my choir buddies at Sacred and Profane to give as a wedding gift to Rebecca, the choir director and her new husband Pete last October. (Barry and I set them up while the newlyweds were on their honeymoon so they found them under the chupa in their garden on their return.)

But I digress... today, with the help of my friend, neighbour and car decal designer Terry Cullinane, I sent the .ai drawing for the sunflower's laser cut background to Seaport Stainless to be cut out of 3/16" mild steel while I work on putting the flower together. Still not sure how I'm going to handle the center... those sunflower seed patterns are crazy and geometrically challenging. I think I'll probably make a mould and fuse the center rather than over-simplifying it with a shallow inverted blown glass bowl which would probably always look like an inverted glass bowl...

Here is my first sketch for the metal, the final drawing (the lines are where the laser will cut to make negative shapes)  and my layout of the flower on the living room floor with the black paper to represent the size of the background (although I've changed the proportions to be wider since the photo was taken ... nothing like a good maquette to check one's ideas). Complication factor 5/10... well maybe 6 because figuring out the negative spaces was a brain-twister. I'm not sure that two layers of petals will look good from the side. Still humming and hawing on that, but I've got a month to work at it and get it all just right...