The Art of Joy Alyssa Day

It was only a matter of time before our skills producing the blown glass planets for our mobiles, orrery, sculptures and ornaments would join up with our new line of wine bottle stoppers.

We decided to couple the two and make Planetary Wine Bottle Stoppers. We figured the techniques would be pretty much identical, so it would be a breeze! Wrong! The various planetary glass pieces we’ve blown before were hollow, and blown out much bigger. We had to decorate the pieces while they were still fairly small, but then as they blew out, the details would get larger and look like what it was supposed to look like.

The new jewelry line came about fairly rapidly, but the website for them took a little longer (isn’t that always the case?). The site is now LIVE! – http://glasssculpture.org/artglass/jewelry/

We decided to add it to our Glass Sculpture site, since the technique doesn’t match up with my Reverse Glass painting, nor does it follow the techniques used in the marbles & wine stoppers.

We’re branching out so much even we get confused sometimes! But it’s all good.  So far, we have wondrous pendants:

Iris Pendant

and captivating Earrings:

Grass Earrings

As we continue our orrery project, it is time to blow the glass planets. As the whole piece is only 6 feet in diameter, that means we have less than 3 feet to fit in 8 planets (they didn’t want Pluto).  To get the planets to fit, be relative scale (impossible to be “actual” scale), and not clunk into each other, the inner planets need to be fairly small.

I made my own gear yesterday!!  I’m so proud of it I could just burst.

A little background – I’m building on orrery (model of the solar system) for the astronomy department of a college in San Mateo, CA.  We’ve built similar things, but of course, every new project requires new skills and stuff that we’ve never done before. For this piece – http://celestialgears.com/, it is going to be motorized with a computer driving the planets with correctly timed orbits. The whole piece is 6 feet in diameter.

Solar System Model - Orrery

While we were at the National Space Symposium, a next door exhibitor asked if we could put together some small awards for students. The catch was he didn’t have much time. I came back to the studio and looked around for something that I had already in stock that would do well as awards, but I only had two or three of each appropriate thingie, and he needed 5 – 4 regular sized and one a bit larger.

I wanted to experiment with my sandblasting and deep carving on glass. My cast glass pieces are usually in the 3/8-1/2 inch thick range, with the colors swirling through the entire depth of the piece. This would make for some great carving, as some of the colors would be opened up, while others would remain untouched.

Since I was getting ready for a space conference, I decided to go with a spacey design. I had a section of glass that for all the world looks like boiling fire, so chose to carve a rocketship taking off into the front of it. This would be just a display piece, as an example of the type of work we can do on countertops, sinks, doors, etc.

Previous posts have focused on the rocket that is the center column for our orrery. The one pictured here doesn’t have the bottom section with the fins, but our new one does. Now that the rocket has been carved and the holes bored into it to accept the drive tubes, it can be put aside for a bit and we move on to the next section – The arms.

The fins are finished! They were cut from solid cherry boards with my radial arm saw and trimmed up with my bandsaw. The blade on that could use some replacing…. Cherry is so hard that mostly the bandsaw blade just burns it while it’s trying to cut. Funny, burned cherry wood smells exactly like popcorn. Now I’m hungry!

Anyways, the fins were roughed out with the saws, but then mostly hand carved to shape on a flat belt sander. I often use the end of the sander to do curves and ripples, so used that to get the curve on the underside of each fin to match each other.

It’s finally stopped storming, so I can continue to work on building my rocketship today. Why does it matter if it’s storming? Some of my equipment (lathe, drill press among other stuff) is out on a covered deck. The covers keep them protected when it rains, but I’m not too good with my hands when it’s cold and wet. I have very low blood pressure, so if my hands get cold, they don’t work very well, and that’s not something you want happening when you’re working with a high speed drill press, or have a large gouge aiming at a huge piece of rapidly spinning wood on a lathe.

I got the rocket carved for the Orrery that we’re making!!!! Yay!!! It was cold though, but not raining. You can see me all bundled up. I actually have three shirts on and two pairs of sweatpants, and gloves. I’m coated with sawdust, as is everything else. It gets in my hair, up my nose and under my contacts, but it’s actually a lot of fun to get so messy and see something come out of nothing.