Accidental Art in Margaritaville

Recycling and being green are the big buzz words these days.

I drive my family crazy with my obsession with saving things, reuse, and generally keeping as much as possible out of the land fills. I compost my garbage, recycle every speck of paper and junk mail, and occasionally check the waste baskets and garbage at the curb.

Friday afternoon I was really tired from a late night at the studio, the heat, and playing in the dirt aka gardening. I was brewing some espresso for some iced coffee and forgot that it does not have an automatic shut off and stood there while it steamed and steamed some more, and then exploded. There was brown goo and glass bits everywhere. The reason I mention it is not because I saved any of the exploded carafe, but just to explain my frame of mind. Shortly after an hour of cleaning up, I opened the cabinet with the stemware and knocked over one of my pretty margarita glasses. It detached from the base. Oops.

So now I get to the good part of the story. With my kiln, I have the ability to melt any kind of glass, so I melted the margarita glass. Thanks to some on-line help from Brad Walker, the author of "Warm Glass", http://www.warmglass.com/. His web site had a firing program for melting bottles. In the days to come I will document my progress. Below is how it looks today.

It is now Sunday evening. After a visit to Grounds for Sculpture and some gardening projects, I have resumed work on a design for this transformed glass. I might paint and fire the spirals.