colour guide to bornholm

Marion with an organic blueberry sorbet
the quarry behind school which is oh so refreshing

my make shift belt

cassius clay

the other day i came upon Cassius Clay, a ceramics studio/gallery just south of Nexo. they are actually former students of the school i'm currently working at. such beautiful work...


the most delicate and precious petals clung all over this table setting

loved the addition of rubber tubing - might even be a bike inner tube (!)

studio: vase - test completed

so here she is, completed


i'll do a few more with the form using colour

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+ more recent work from the studio

still need to finish the bottoms

chic biking in CPH + random street graphix

can't get enough!

this is an ultra common site here - heels and cute bikes


+ i just came across this blog

..."cycling in Copenhagen is a mixture of ease, grace, beauty and a casual, relaxed attitude." so true. the biking infrastructure here really makes a difference. it makes New York truly feel like the wild west. check out the their site for a lot more great photos.

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street signs and such...

a grocery store ad in Copenhagen

mural in Nexo, Bornholm


daycare in Nexo - where the kids took over

also on Bornholm

?!? sign in Helsinki (via Tawny)

i love these signs that show you that you leaving a town.
something about the red bar through the iconic town silhouette seems harsh to me.

studio: work II

before i head to Copenhagen for the weekend, more glimpses into my sketch book and glass designs from the past couple weeks



these were sketches which later developed into the design for my vase using the plaster mold

my Graal embryo - a beautiful/labor intensive Swedish technique, in progress. i'll post more about this piece later but click [here] to learn more about it.

i was experimenting here with adding hot glass onto a bubble and sucking (instead of blowing) which creates a double wall effect. i was so thrilled when my teacher Charlie showed us this - definitely will try this again.

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and some glass blowing

studio: mold testing

so here's the deal:

we prepared our molds by soaking them in milk (which when heated is an odor i will never forget). the reason being that the fat in the milk creates a nice coating which helps the glass form smoothly when hot.

for a first try in the mold not terrible - if you can tell the bottom lip of the vase got a bit bent since i pulled away half of the mold from the top end. next time i'll pull from the bottom and it should come out a lot more symmetrical, also the mold reacts better after a few attempts - you actually want the walls to burn and create a smoother finish.

(almost half of the glass you see here gets cut off - it's just a lot easier to have a good amount on the end that you are cutting)

i'll try a few more times with this mold next week - with colour

studio: mold making

this week we worked on making our first prototypes of a vase with the following guidelines: no higher then 16cm (the same dimensions that companies report the best sales records - perfect gift size), commercially manufacturable, perfectly symmetrical, and could easily be shaped using a mold.

molds, which you use by blowing the glass bubble inside and rotating the pipe so that the glass takes the form, can be made of metal (aluminum), graphite, wood, and even plaster. the glass industry uses metal molds which can be heated and have a very long life span but since we'll make just a few we used plaster.


for the first prototype decided to pursue this apple core shape. the angles/corners are exaggerated but when the glass gets blown in the form it retains much softer curves. once i decided on the silhouette i made a stencil which would attache to a spinning wheel and carve the plaster to create the negative mold.

i will not hide the fact that the process took many attempts. you have very little time to sculpt on the wheel before the plaster sets + its common to have your from detach from the wheel as it spins (!)

the process gets super messy - and brought memories of this past year in the plaster room at Pratt


success - which also came with a lollipop from the technician

a coat of shillac on the negative in order to create the positive mold

the final plaster mold with drilled holes to allow the steam to escape when the glass is being blown inside
our mold teacher, Anders, showed us a cool trick to separate the two parts of the mold... you rest a sting before you pour the plaster along the parting line and just before the plaster sets you pull it up

so stay tuned for the results...

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this week we also started to think about colour... love this combination

i just put this little assortment in the kiln last night - testing to see the reaction of what these slats of coloured glass will do if they are vertically melted?!

(also from) touring bornholm

a highlight from touring the island was visiting the Bornholms Kunstmuseum (Art Museum).
we've seen many modern, well designed art museums in Scandinavia but this building blew me away. it was built in 1993 designed by the architectural firm Fogh og Følner A/S (Lyngby)... full of surprises

windows views of the landscape - some are so small and low that only children can fully appreciate them.



a channel of water runs through out the museums main corridor.
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