Glass Scoop Dish

Finally finished a wedding present I've been working on for the last 4-5 months or so. I think I can post the start to finish here as the couple doesn't read my blog. Hopefully. I wanted to choose colors that weren't too wild but something that would still have color so I went with blues and grays. I started with a pile of glass that I chunk-ed up. Lots of clear and then blues and smokey grays which almost went black. Also mixed transparents with opaques.

So, after the first firing this is what it looked like...
Not that exciting yet ... but just wait... next I cut it into strips, turned the pieces on their sides and fired them again.
then cut and turned them again...
and fired again.
then took that piece and cut it into a rectangle and added strips of 5 different colors - an opaque royal blue and light gray and then transparent smokey gray, light blue, and a darker gray (the dark gray pretty much went black).

Once that was fired I shaped it on the tile saw and grinders. This is actually the bottom of the piece which became the top of the piece. Notice it has some texture from the kiln shelf and is sortof a matte finish.
I don't have pics of all the inbetween shaping but once it was shaped I slumped it into a scoop mold and here it is! :0) The finish is semi-shiny but not super shiny - this was on purpose. Hope they like it. I plan to give it to them in the next couple weeks when I see them.

(it's on a textured placement so that's where the diagonal lines in the shadow are from)

Bacon

I went to the new restaurant Bacon when it opened and had a breakfast taco but have been meaning to go back since then. They have a hamburger that is 1/2 ground beef and 1/2 bacon. But I needed to really prepare myself for trying it. On one hand it sounded totally awesome but on the other hand I thought it might be huge and have chunks of coagulated bacon fat in it and that would gross me out. Also it was a $10 hamburger and that's really expensive unless it is super top grade cow or something. So, I was going to go last week. But wasn't ready. Then monday night but thought I may have trouble sleeping after it and it had already been a super long day. So Tuesday for lunch I went and had the Double Grind Hamburger. I probably should have gone ahead and eaten it months ago. It really wasn't that special. It was normal size. I had no trouble eating it all. There were no blobs of bacon fat in it and in fact the first couple bites I tasted a bacon flavor but didn't see any bacon in it. It did taste freshly ground and the bun, lettuce, tomato, and 2 dill pickle slices were good. It came with fries and they were ok but nothing special. They were skinny fries and reminded me of PTerry's. Overall, it wasn't worth the $13 I paid. Sadly I doubt the place will stay in business. It's cute and all that and a gaggle of hipsters walked in as I was leaving but the place just seems over-hyped or something. I do still like their pig t-shirts though.