Kids Design at Tacoma Museum of Glass – Post 22 of our August Seattle trip

In this project, children submit designs and the winning designs are created by the glass artists. They make two glass pieces, one for the child and one for the museum. I loved them!

Be sure to read the kids’ explanations on the plaques. Cracks me up!

This next one is my total favorite – an orca in a garage band with an eye patch! (I presume a nod to Dale Chihuly?) How many regional references can this child cram into one concept? Amazing.

“The rest is normal”, lol. It was delightful!

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Gallery, Tacoma Museum of Glass – Post 21 of our August Seattle trip

After watching the artists blowing glass in the hot shop, we visited the gallery. Not all of the glass art was blown glass. Here’s a disappearing ball of color:

This chair was really amazing, but I think they could have exhibited it better with more lighting and a darker background. It was hard to see! Maybe that was the point.

You can definitely tell it’s not all Chihuly in this exhibit, lol.

These were large, wall-sized exhibits. Clear glass and shadow.

These squid-in-glass were a little strange, but it seemed like it would take some skill to make.

In one of the rooms in the gallery there was a fair amount of unnerving or grotesque art, which I ignored. Sorry, I didn’t take any photos of it. I just like simple, pretty things, lol.

I also like things that reflect a regional sense of place. Jellyfish are common in the Puget Sound.

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Hot Shop in Tacoma – Post 20 of our August Seattle trip

The week after we went to the Chihuly Garden and Glass in Seattle, we went to the Museum of Glass in Tacoma. Of the two, we preferred the Tacoma Museum of Glass because it was larger, contained a hot shop, and was generally more interesting. It contained some exhibits by Dale Chihuly, but it showcased other glass artists as well. However, if you’re specifically interesting in Chihuly’s work, the Chihuly Garden and Glass in Seattle did a better job with his exhibits.

We started with the hot shop where they make glass art. They have two primary methods of heating the glass; the torch, and the “glory hole”, which is a furnace. Here is a short movie of them heating glass with a torch.

They inflate the hot glass by blowing down the long handle of a blowpipe. It seems like it would take a lot of lung strength but they told us, no, you only blow softly or you will explode the glass. When they blow on the pipe, you can’t really see much happening – the glass just slowly gets a little larger.

In this next video they transferred their glass from one pipe to another one in order to turn the glass around. First they put a small blob of warm glass on the end of the new pipe (the orange blob). Then they stick the new pipe with the warm glass into the back end of the glass piece. Then they crack the glass off of the original pipe.

They break glass in a controlled manner by scoring it where they want it to break, and sometimes also dripping some water on it the break point, and then striking it sharply and quickly but without too much force. Sometimes the glass piece will shatter at this point, and they have to start all over again.

When the piece is done, they crack it off the pipe and put it into the annealer (a hot oven) to cool it slowly. 

It was a very interesting demonstration. One of the artists explained what was going on as we watched. They also had an overhead screen where they projected explanatory slides, or a close-up camera view of the action below.

There were elevated walkways along the sides and back where we could stand and look down.

The artist in the photo below was off to one side, shaping a piece of blown glass. We could stand nearly directly above him on the walkway and watch. He rolls the pipe back and forth on the two rails with his left hand, turning the glass, while holding the mold steady against the glass with his right hand.

In addition to molds, they also use stacks of wet newspaper and wooden paddles to shape the glass while it’s hot.

Here’s the audience watching.

The architecture is cool. This is the ceiling.

In addition to the hot shop, there was a museum gallery, a children’s design section (which was truly fun), and outdoor exhibits. I will post about those next!

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Countertop woes and next stop – Montana

August is over already! Our Seattle vacation ended this morning and we said a sad farewell to our hosts, (now friends) Amy and Ian. We hope to be back next year. We really enjoyed our month in Seattle.

I have several Seattle posts yet to write, but meanwhile I want to keep you up to date in real time. Otherwise it gets confusing for those of you who are in contact with us tracking our progress, if everything I post is two weeks or even a month delayed. I’m behind on my posts…another glass blowing adventure, another major hike, a day trip to Olympia, Alki Beach from yet another perspective…

I am getting tired of uploading vacation pictures, but I know I have some readers who like them. And I still have a lot of photos to share! So yes, I will go back and finish those soon.

We plan to swing through Montana on our way to Albuquerque. We want to check out Flathead Lake. It’s not too far out of our way as we head southeast back to Albuquerque, where John needs to return to work. He’s been occasionally working remotely from Seattle this month, but he has a backlog of work that has to be done in person.

Meanwhile, I am getting nervous about the remodel and keep thinking I should be in Tucson to keep an eye on that. Our countertop project is giving us grief. Remember how much trouble we had with floor tile? We’re having even more trouble with countertop. Although we still don’t have our floor tile either. We ordered it a long time ago and the ship date has slipped twice.

The countertop hasn’t even been ordered yet. We thought we had countertop figured out already, but the quotes came in a lot higher than we expected, so we went back to square one. We decided to go with quartzite, which is a natural stone, instead of quartz, which is a man-made stone. Somehow real quartzite is cheaper than manmade quartz, even though that doesn’t make any sense to me.

The challenge with natural stone is it’s hard to find something that is subtle enough for my taste. I don’t like busy, clashy patterns with a lot of colors and contrast. Most natural granite and quartzite options have too much visually going on, which I find disorienting when working in the kitchen.

After quite a search, I finally found quartzite that I like. There is a set of slabs at a slab yard in Phoenix that I want – but it’s frustrating because I can’t put a hold on them without buying them. And I can’t just buy them either. The fabricator is supposed to do that – he gets a discount.

I’m almost tempted to not worry about the discount and just buy them, but I don’t even know how many slabs we need to buy until the fabricator tells me. I think we need three of them, but it might be just two. If I buy three and turn out to only need two, I can’t return the third. On the other hand, if I buy two and need a third, it’s likely I won’t be able to get the exact right slab to match the original two. If I need three, I’ll need three consecutive slabs – they are natural stone and the color and pattern won’t line up right if we don’t buy them as a bundle. Any day now someone else could buy the middle one of the run of three that I need, and then the other two would be useless to me and I’ll be back to square one again. Argh. And the fabricator isn’t returning our calls. We’ve contacted a second fabricator who isn’t returning calls either.

My instinct is to get on a plane and go out to Tucson and get everything fixed. Except even if I were to go out to Tucson, we’d still just be waiting for a fabricator – any fabricator – to call us back. There’s probably nothing additional I could do about the countertop from Tucson that we can’t do over the phone from Seattle or Montana or Albuquerque.

The quartzite will be somewhat cheaper than the quartz, but it’s still not cheap. Unfortunately, John and I don’t overlap on our opinions regarding viable cheap options. I would just use tile, but that means grout lines, and John is not a fan. Or I’d do Corian, which is a modern version of formica, but John would hate it. He would do butcher block – everywhere. Which would be affordable, but I’m vetoing that idea because in my experience, wood will get funky.

Granite is an option too – quartzite and granite are very similar, both are natural stones and both are quite hard and durable, and they are similarly priced. Granite tends to have spotted patterns and quartzite tends to have more linear patterns like marble. Both quartzite and granite are harder than marble.

Here is a picture of one of the quartzite slabs that I want, but I’m trying not to get my heart set on it and get my hopes up, because there’s no guarantees yet. But if this works out, I think the rust colored veins will tie in well with the terracotta floor tile. And it seems restful to look at, rather than jarring, and it looks natural.

I’ll let you know how that turns out.

Meanwhile, hopefully I’ll get some more of the remaining Seattle photos posted as we drive across Washington, the northern Idaho panhandle, and into Montana today. Handling photos can be somewhat difficult in a moving vehicle, so no promises. We’ll be camping for the next several days as we work our way east and then south to Albuquerque. But I expect to have enough cell reception to keep up with my blog.

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Sunset over the Sound – Post 19 of our August Seattle trip

The same day as we went kayaking at Alki Beach, we walked down to Lincoln Park in the evening. Alki Beach is not within walking distance, but Lincoln Park is quite close by, just a steep hike.

The sun went down after we got back up the hill. This next picture is taken from the alley, looking out over the neighbor’s driveway behind us.

This is next photo is what we can see from our patio. It’s not a full view of the water, but it isn’t bad!

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Kayaking on Alki Beach – Post 18 of our August Seattle trip

At some point recently (I am losing all track of time), a couple of days after we bicycled along Alki beach, we rented kayaks and kayaked along Alki beach. Same place, completely different perspective.

It started out cloudy but became sunnier during the trip.

I think we spent more time sitting around taking pictures of each other than we did paddling.

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John’s still joyriding ferries – Post 17 of our August Seattle trip

Ferries plus a water taxi! Which, as far as I can tell, is just a small ferry. I didn’t go on this trip, so I don’t have much to say about it other than, here are the pictures! I believe he took a water taxi from Alki Beach to downtown, and then a ferry from downtown out to Bainbridge Island.

John took this gorgeous photo of Mt. Rainier, which was barely visible on a cloudy, early morning ferry ride from Fauntleroy to Vashon Island a couple of days later. I can’t write a new post every time John rides a ferry, so I’m tacking this photo onto the end of this post.

In Washington we have an expression, “the mountain is out” because it is often obscured by clouds. Depending on your location and angle, the mountain can really dominate the sky – on those few days it’s actually visible.

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I almost forgot my own birthday – Post 16 of our August Seattle trip

On Friday I got a text message from a number that wasn’t in my contacts. It was from a mortgage broker. I glanced at it, slightly annoyed, and said to John, “It’s just spam. It says to have a happy birthday tomorrow. It’s not my birthday tomorrow.”

Oh. Wait. Tomorrow? My birthday? John and I looked at each other. Unfortunately for John, he’s a terrible actor. He was as surprised as I was. He had that deer-in-headlights, bug-eyed look. I’m pretty sure one of us said, “Oh shit.” At least we were both thinking it.

It was bizarre how totally and thoroughly I had forgotten about it. Just earlier that same day I had been talking to Laura about Alex’s birthday that is coming up soon. But I didn’t remember that my own birthday was coming up even sooner than Alex’s. She probably figured I was just being modest about it. I’ll have to edit my birthday calendar to include my own birthday along with my friends and family so I’ll remember next year!

That afternoon John and I went grocery shopping. We were in middle of shopping when John suddenly said, “wait here a sec” and dashed off, leaving me standing in the produce section. Eye roll. Clearly he was off to buy a card or candy bar or something for my forgotten birthday. Couldn’t he at least waited until I was settled in the car to dash off and leave me stranded? The store’s security guy eyed me as I stood there doing nothing except looking grumpy in the produce section, lol.

I wonder when one of us would have remembered if it weren’t for the spam from the mortgage broker? We would at least have figured it out on my birthday because that’s when the texts from family and friends started coming in. First a note from my sister, and then this wonderful video from Laura.

I don’t know when or where I learned that alternative birthday song, but I always used to sing it to the kids. I still will occasionally sing it over the phone or to their voicemail on their birthdays. So I got a full video version from Laura, live from Pismo Beach, where she is on a company retreat this weekend. It was good of her to work in a mnemonic so I can remember how old I am, lol.

For my birthday we took a day trip down to Olympia. I’ll post pictures from Olympia soon. I still have a few other trips from the last couple of weeks to get posted. We’re still in Seattle and we’ve been doing so much, I can’t keep up!

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Biking along Alki Beach – Post 15 of our August Seattle trip

The day started out foggy. John went for an early morning run with Biska down to the water in our neighborhood.

By late morning it was a warm sunny day. We drove our bikes down to Alki beach, where there is a long, flat bike path. I wanted to ride down there because I don’t like riding with cars and prefer a path. Also there’s no way I could ride a bike uphill from the Puget Sound into the hills where we are spending this month in West Seattle. It’s only a few blocks but the streets are incredibly steep.

It was beautiful and relaxing riding along the waterfront.

I generally don’t take many pictures while on a bike ride because I’m too busy hanging onto my handlebars. But we did pause on this overlook and take a few shots.

Dill weed! I remember it from my childhood.

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A few more Chihuly Glass Pictures – Post 14 of our August Seattle trip

As if there wasn’t already enough Chihuly pictures in that last post! But John was disappointed to discover that he hadn’t sent me his photos, and I hadn’t noticed that I didn’t have them because I had so many of my own.

So here’s Chihuly Glass from John’s perspective. He took a large number of pictures of me taking pictures, most of which I left out because, enough already! But it does make for a different perspective. You can consider this your “behind the scenes” post.

These first couple of photos are useful because you can see how the exhibit was set up, spotlighted in the center of an otherwise dim room. It allowed for photos of the exhibit without the spectators being easily picked up by the camera. And yet we could still get up close to the exhibit.

You can almost point your phone randomly into the exhibit and get a great shot, but here you can see John was highlighting the reflective mirror effect of the exhibit. I’ve seen other Chihuly exhibits that weren’t nearly as well done. Same art, less impact. This gallery did a great job with display.

This next one is useful because it shows the size of the artwork.

As we hold our phones aloft in appreciation.

And lastly, a well-balanced ballsy shot, right into the sun.

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