Friday 8 March 2013

Polishing glass


I got this cloche (actually a cheese dish with... cloche?) in a local thrift shop, a couple of years ago. I thought it was dirty or just covered in hard water marks. The lightning in the shop is pretty bad.

Turn out it was permanently etched. Apparently this can happen due to salts or other chemicals carried in the water that condenses on the surface of the glass. Could be the glass is of poor quality (looks like recycled glass) or maybe a particular noxious kind of cheese was stored in it? hehe.

Anyway, the cloche lingered unused because the etch was bad enough to not allow much light for plants and hiding the contents.

Today I decided to try and polish it, I didn't have much to lose.

To my surprise it worked!



Here a portion of the cloche had been polished. The glass doesn't look perfect (nor do I want it to, I do like shabby, not to the extent of un-usability though), but it is again transparent and usable.

I used my small motor (similar to a Dremel) with a felt polishing tip (I tried the cotton wheel but the results were not as good) and white polishing compound for silver, from a jeweler's supply shop. This is just what I had around. I don't know how other compounds would work, but the wheel with no compound did nothing, to be sure. The compound is important.


Then when I went on to actually build a terrarium I realised that I couldn't access my supplies. We do have a bit of a temporary set-up in the kitchen. I think it perhaps better wait until after we move. That is months away... and then I won't have the time I guess. We'll see!

Tuesday 5 March 2013

Enamelling classes online? a survey

Hello everyone!

UPDATE 2016

I now have this project in the backburner. I registered a domain, enamelworkshop.com, created a landing page in the website, and have set up a newsletter.

As I have more information, whici will still take a while, I will keep the subscribers to the newsletter updated. This will not happen for a while yet, and I will not be spamming ;) so if you don't want to miss any update...

SUBSCRIBE!
See you soon,
Mer


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I've been pondering about this for a long time now. I got the idea due to the very positive response I got to the videos I posted to Grains of Glass (all of the videos I took at the time are here in my website).


09P: Shading enamels from Mer Almagro on Vimeo.

Even though my purpose when filming them was more illustrative for potential customers than didactic, I got many thank-yous and people telling me they had learned from them. I also got a lot of questions. I did answer the best I could within the scope, but I also saw that the videos had a great potential to actually teach, reaching people anywhere in the globe, which is not possible for me to do locally.



Of course in order to do this properly I would have to spend a lot of time and effort, so it would become sort of a... job? My idea is not to be the sole teacher but to have guest contributions as well. I have also contacted people in other fields (sound, image, coding, etc) that would offer their knowledge in order to create a professional product.

Before jumping head first I thought I should probably make a survey. I made one here:

FILL IN THE SURVEY

If you would be at all interested in enamelling classes online, at any level, it would be very helpful to me if you could take a moment to fill it in. You can also forward the link to anyone you think could be interested.
The survey is anonymous and all questions are optional.

Perhaps together we can make this possible.

Any other suggestions are also welcome, here through the forum or directly to my email: mer.almagro@gmail.com

Many thanks to everyone in advance!
Mer