A little stumble....

 Today I had a meltdown, like a six year old might, when my project didn't end up looking how I wanted it to look!

The day started well with me managing to scrounge some nuts and bolts off my Husbands friend - I am trying very hard not to purchase a single thing towards the making of this clock, so if I don't personally have what I need I will ask other people if they have it.  If they don't I will have to rethink my plan.

I then had to mark off where to drill on my ring, and the piece that would sit underneath, and find a drill bit large enough to accommodate the bolt.  My first attempt at drilling a hole wasn't massively successful as the wood all chipped badly on the back.

So I gripped it to the underneath piece and decided to drill them together.  This didn't work well either as the wood then just chipped under the second bit.

So I then drilled right through both and into a scrap piece of wood.  This worked!

If at first you don't succeed, try and try again.... as they say.

I didn't want the bolts to be black, so I drilled a load of holes in a scrap of wood to stand them up in while I spray painted them.  I also painted the two pieces of wood as the same time to hide all the chipped holes.

Once the paint was dry it was time to work on the wording.

My daughter had come up with a nice slogan that I thought would work well.  I wanted the word 'Time' in it, and also the word 'Waste'.

"Don't call time on the earth, reused, don't waste"

I liked this so I then proceeded to write it on the ring, in-between the screw holes.

And this is where my meltdown began..... why I even attempted it in the first place is beyond me, I know my handwriting is complete scrawl.

I type, I have no need to write.  Maybe that's a skill I should work on for the future.

The worst bit was, I didn't actually have my meltdown at this point, where it would have been much easier to rectify... no, I waited until I had glued all the wood into place on the glass bottles and screwed all the bolts tightly into place too.  THEN I decided to have my tantrum.

I decided to pour myself a rather large glass of wine and put it all away to deal with another day.

Deciding on a layout for my clock.

  Sometimes I have a determined plan in my head about where a design should end up, and other times  (most others) I just see how the pieces fit together and how much I like the look.

Not just with glass, but also with quilting and crochet, I will lay out a design, take a photo, move it around, take a photo...numerous times.  Then I go and make a cup of tea and flick through the photos, finally choosing a design/layout that way.

You seem to get a different view through a camera, you can certainly spot flaws and mistakes more in a photograph I think.

So I laid my bottles out in the kiln...

Then I decided that I really did need numbers, at least on some of them.

Using some old copper sheet that I had rescued from a fire pit, hence the beautiful colours on it, and cut it up.

I decided on Roman Numerals as it would be much easier to cut straight lines of copper sheets, rather than cut around shaped numbers.

I don't know where my head was when I did this, as I cut enough pieces to make up numbers 1, 3, 6 and 9, it wasn't until I was placing them that I realised I need a 12 instead of a 1.  thank goodness I caught that in time!

So, back to the kiln and laying out a design.

I finally settled on the middle design, it was a difficult decision which I pondered over for sometime.

The bottom design used all 12 bottles, which equated to the 12 numbers on a clock, but it just seemed a little bulky, plus I thought if I halved the use of the green bottles it would leave enough for another art piece in the future perhaps,

The kiln lid is now tightly shut and heating up nicely to fuse all the pieces together.   Fingers crossed!

Messing about with wine bottles.

 I seem to manage to collect all sorts of glass  - glass fascinates me and if I see a nice coloured bottle or an interesting shape I can never bring myself to put it in the recycling.   Because of this habit I have amassed quite a collection.

Some I make into pretty lamps, others I melt and make abstract shapes from.

For my sustainability assignment I have decided to try and make a clock out of mini wine bottles. 

I had a box of these mini Mateus Rose bottles, just because they are such a pleasing shape, so thought it was a good time to make them into something new.

So, time for a good scrub.  It took a pan scourer and a teaspoon to scrape all the lables off, and I had to cut off the little wire ring around the neck. Neither of these would have been good in the kiln.

When they were all nice and clean I put the bottles in the kitchen oven to make sure they well and truly dried out.   My kiln is a glass kiln which wouldn't take too kindly to the presence of moisture within it.

I laid them all out, making sure none of them were touching, then programmed the kiln to do an overnight fusing fire.

In the morning I opened the kiln lid to find a set of lovely flat little bottles.  Result!

As my kiln isn't a large one I needed to do two firings to get enough bottles for my piece.  So now another patient wait until tomorrow when the next lot will be ready   :)