Oct 20th, 2014: Knitted Glass

[xoxoxoBruce]

Knitted glass? Ha ha, very funny, made me think.
Fiberglass has been spun into thread and woven into cloth since forever. Knitting it would be no big deal.

Yes but I'm not talking about fiberglass but real glass.



Carol Milne, a Canadian artist living in Seattle, is a life long knitter.
But making a living knitting is pretty tough since any Grannie can keep the children in ugly Christmas sweaters.
But combining it with her cast glass skills has produced a body of work unlike any other.

Casting glass, bronze, or any other pourable material is usually done with a lost wax method. A sample of the desired shape is made in wax, embedded in plaster, then melted out leaving a cavity the desired shape. Fill that with most any pourable material that will harden when it cools. One other thing is needed and that's holes to let the liquid in and the air out, called sprues. Heavy wax threads are used to form the sprues before the plaster or other mold material is formed.
Got it? Got it! Good!

Now once upon a time, Milne was in the studio and must have been daydreaming while picking up all the sprue wax threads laying around, because she wondered about knitting them. That proved to be tough because the wax was too weak and stretchy to knit normally. Finally she figured out a method of knitting each stitch by hand, one at a painfully slow time. But the creation of unique cast glass art pieces is never fast, otherwise they wouldn't be suffering for their art.

She also makes a lot of different glass pieces like teapots, garden tiles and grenade shapes she calls bombs.



Seattle... hmm, earthquake country and glass art. Job security or devil may care bohemian?

[limey]

Amazing!

[fargon]

Beautiful.

[Griff]

coolz