Baby Mockingbirds

Here is a video of two baby Mockingbirds. You may wonder why I have them. I think we can all guess who is to blame...

Smokey brought one in this morning, and I caught him with it in the dining room. Since he'd come in through the open back door, I put him outside the front door to keep him away while I dealt with the bird. The poor little thing had been shrieking whilst in Smokey's clutches, but did not look harmed. I put him into some tissues, in a small box, and he settled down to some quiet squeaks. I then made a call to Austin Wildlife Rehab to see what I should do with the bird. They advised me to call Austin Wildlife Rescue as they were closer to me and had a drop-in centre.

Just as I'd got off the phone, guess what? Smokey reappears with bird no.2... HEY! drop that and give it to me. I took the second bird and locked Smokey in the sun room. I put the new one in with his sibling; he didn't look harmed either. Since there was an hour before the wildlife place opened, I left the birds to quiet down and went for a shower.

On exiting the shower, I could hear wild squeaking... went back to the birds, lifted the tissue and this is how I found them! Hungry, I guess. The quiet one woke up later on, in the car.

I'd been advised that cat saliva is full of toxins and since they had been in a cat's mouth, the birds would not survive without antibiotics. So 40 minutes later - accompanied by two sets of constant loud squeakings the whole way - I was at the wildlife rescue place (it's that far of a drive away, unfortunately). They identified them as Mockingbirds and told me they naturally fall out of the nest and spend a few days on the ground, before learning to fly. These two should be OK with a bit of patching up and care.

Meanwhile, Smokey is going to be Watched...

Brick Oven Update

A quick brick oven update, for those of you who may be curious.

Alan has been trying to get work done on this oven all year, but has been stymied by the weather and cold temperatures that prevent him using the fire cement. But he has made some progress over the last couple of weekends.

He is up to five rows of brick! You can really see the hemisphere taking shape now.

And he has made the first row of bricks of the arched tunnel. Here they are on the former. Alan made a new former which is much better than the first one; he found a better material to make the curved top with and it's a proper curve now, rather than the creased cardboard he had before. So now we have a nice regular arch of bricks.

And for the first time, we can get a sense of how it will be to look down the tunnel into the oven.

Two Bowls

Here's a couple of round designs, in the kiln and ready to be fused. They are sitting on Thinfire paper, which is a ceramic-infused paper that gives a nice surface on glass, and doesn't stick to the glass like kiln wash does. I've weighted down the corners with some firebrick offcuts from Alan's oven.

Eight hours of fusing later, we have two nice smooth glass discs!

Now, it is time to try slumping some glass. I purchased some slumping moulds from Bonny Doon in California. They are bottomless, so the bases of the pieces will always be flat. And I just liked the cute small sizes of these bowls - 5,6 and 7 inches in diameter. The steel ring is a casting mould; of which, more later...

The two blanks were both 6" in diameter, so I used the two larger moulds. It doesn't matter if you don't fill a mould completely but you just can't let glass slump over the edge, if it's too wide.

I set the kiln to a slumping cycle, up to 1230F and hold for 10 minutes. I peeked inside at the end of the hold to make sure the glass had gone all the way to the bottom of the moulds, and it had, so I did not need to extend the hold. This morning, all was cool again, and this is what I found:

I took the bowls out of the moulds, washed off the residual dust and here we are!:

A closer look

So there we go; my first actual proper pieces, made in my own kiln.

The Kiln

I enjoyed doing my fused glass class. A lot. And it would be nice to continue to be able to make such pieces. This, of course, requires a kiln... So here it is; The Beast, my own glass fusing kiln :-)

It is a Paragon CS-16D; 16 inches square and 6.5 inches deep (inside dimensions). This is big enough to make large dishes with, and the like.

Here it is with the body open. You can build items directly on the shelf this way.

Here are my first test pieces, on the shelf and ready to go.

A wider angle look at it, with just the lid raised this time.

The full fuse firing took a little over eight hours, and this picture shows the kiln at the highest temperature of 1492F (it was hovering +/-2F around the 1490 I programmed it to reach). The kiln will store four programs and run automatically. I've only programmed the fuse firing so far; in due course I will be slumping and doing other things, I am sure.

Although the kiln stops running after eight hours or so, it takes forever to cool those last few hundred degrees back to room temperature, so this was what I found the next morning. Fused pieces!

A closer look at the bubbles and frit. You make regular bubbles by taking two pieces of ribbed glass and fusing them at 90 degrees to each other. The orange frit in the brown piece was dropped into the grooves of another piece of ribbed glass, with the brown on top. Just to see what it would do.

So there you go... watch this space for Shiny Items!

Spring Is Sprung

Spring is blooming here in Central Texas, and this year our back yard is filled to profusion with bluebonnets. Next door's meadow is a carpet of blue, too. The unusually wet last couple of months have brought them out in quantity; this is the best display we have had since we moved in.

Gratuitous Smokey Cat picture, since he was sitting so nicely :-)

Smokey's Shed

We decided to get a new garden shed, to store all the lawn mowers/grass hoovers, strimmers and associated garden-based clutter that seems to have overwhelmed our garage. We'd like to actually keep parking vehicles in there.

So the nice folks at Sheds And More came over and did the honours. It is 8x10 feet and made with Hardie siding, so it should last longer than a wooden shed. Hardie is a compressed concrete-based sheet that is formed into various shapes; the siding on this shed is formed to look like woodgrain, and it does a passable job - once it's painted, you don't really notice.

Of course, I couldn't let the opportunity pass by for a bit of timelapse photography. I asked the builders if they minded some cameras and they didn't mind, so here is their six hours of work compressed into a little over two minutes. Both cameras were running at 5-second intervals. I had a GoPro Hero close to the shed, and my Canon DLSR with a long lens, on the balcony.

This is essentially the same way as they build houses around here; framing them up with the wooden structure before covering them in barrier cloth and whatever exterior you're using. Houses have concrete slabs underneath with all the plumbing pre-installed, but after that it's very similar.

As I am typing this, it is a few days later and the shed has been Tetrised... everything is jammed in there and needs organising already. It wouldn't be a proper shed without that, now would it?

This is my excuse for not ironing today.

Can I use this excuse every day?

Why, I do believe I can! ;-)