Slumping

Right now that's me. Slumping, that is. It's been fun, sure, getting almost the entire club's supply of fusible glass ready for the Saturday morning half price sale. It involves digging into all sorts of corners, behind drawers, inside closets, locating the stores the club has. It's been hidden, mostly behind padlocks, where nobody has seen it so nobody buys it. And when somebody does have a project in mind, new glass gets ordered because nobody knows we likely already have some in abundance. I have now seen every single piece of it. The club has been sitting on likely a couple thousand dollars worth of unsold inventory. The solution reached was to sell it all at half price, spread across tables at a time when nobody is working at them, open the doors for 5 hours, and see how much we can get rid of.

Technically it's not been my job. However.... 

I started by volunteering to mark the prices down on each piece, as is. Nobody gets to cut a piece off a larger sheet at the sale, but has to buy what is there. Cut it later yourselves. Some prices are marked on already cut pieces from when they were stored away. Others have a $___ per square inch sticker. Those are the fun ones. If the borders are straight lines, I just lay it on a rubberized pad with an inches grid laid out. If a piece has broken, it's time to get a little creative, erring on the side of what's reasonably usable instead of exact area. Then there's our head of the supply room, who decided with one tote-full that they were originally way overpriced and my starting point before halving it should be different. Another day he thinks top dollar is the right starting place and half that is too low. Those changes usually come partway through a batch being marked. Prices are in Sharpies on the glass along with their COE of either 90 or 96. They have to be removed to be changed, and that can mean acetone. I emptied the last club bottle. At least there is a calculator to work with. 

For several reasons we wind up with identical glass in kind and size but with different prices on it. Since we often ordered what we already had, the next batch may come at a different price from the suppliers. Or they look the same but had different manufacturers. We're just going to tell shoppers to shop wisely. In all, the end result will be at a loss, but the club will have more in the bank for whatever the next need is, rather than just storing glass and getting nothing.

There has been a lot of exercise involved, toting glass around, coming out of the office to talk to people, ask & answer questions, and going back to mark more, toting small loads back into their storage places waiting for getting onto the tables. Luckily I sent out an email asking for help in exchange for getting credit for an hour of volunteering time along with an advanced look at what is being offered. Many hands really do make light work. We actually sold glass today, now people were seeing it, as we have since this started, at full price, or double what's now marked. If you fall in love with a specific piece, you can gamble on whether it will be there Saturday, or buy ahead. Preparation starts with the full clear-off, clean-off of tables from that day's use, then toting all the glass out to the correct table (90 or 96), sorting pieces and laying them out so they are visually logical, like all the black in one spot, red in another, etc. It all took less than an hour.

There was another side to getting ready for the sale. It was getting members unfamiliar with glass interested in starting using it, and thus buying it on sale. That meant my teaching two workshops on making wind chimes. 8 people signed up, 5 showed up. It was still a workshop on each of two consecutive days, and each took nearly 4 hours. There's a lot of safety issues, where-is...? issues, choosing glass, learning to use the tools, and assembling the glass pieces with wires that will be embedded for hanging once they emerge from their kilns. Each workshop overlaps the next day because each kiln needs removal and cleanup of yesterday's glass before it's useable again. To complicate matters one of the kilns went on the fritz - either a rare hiccup or a bad thermocouple, but only another try will tell. Apparently it's happened and self-corrected before.

With all that going on I have been in the club for several hours every day this week, and today was longer than a full day there. So I was definitely slumping before walking out the last couple days.

But slumping is what's keeping me awake at night for over a week now as well. I first heard of it as something people do with empty glass bottles, and dismissed it as ridiculous. Who'd want that? A variation of slumping is a new technique I'm working on with my own glass for this year's major projects. It starts with fusion, because you want extra thick and heavy glass. This means cutting two pieces exactly the same, lining them up perfectly and doing the first fusing (baking) in a kiln. Some people add more decorations and/or detail later and wind up with 3 layers, but I've been to busy to get to that point yet. Anyway, the first fusing is always on a flat surface. Slumping involves a pre-made mold, coated between uses with a special product that keeps glass from sticking because kiln paper no longer works on curved places, then laying the glass across the top so melting and gravity combine to give what was flat a new shape. It either flows into or over the mold, depending on whether it's an "innie" or an "outie". Our club has various molds of both kinds which I'm just learning about. I haven't gotten to that step quite yet, not just from being extremely busy, but what I have in mind isn't one of the forms in the club. There will be shopping at a Phoenix glass store. I have fused one glass combination, now ready for its mold, to see whether I want to buy a lot more of those pieces, and the result is a solid maybe.

The part keeping me up is mentally reviewing in my mind the various pieces of glass I have seen, thinking how I would combine them into a two tone piece, wondering how many I can find or which other combinations I'd be making instead... over and over and over and....  It tends to happen, the sleep deprivation, when I'm in the planning phases of a new project. Once I get to the doing part and it starts working, sleep comes back just fine, and 5 hour nights become 7 or 8 again. Of course with the sale in the morning, actually later this morning, the one hour nap I had in front of the TV has combined with its stress to make further sleep impossible. I have to be there early, making sure last minute details are done, and ready to start putting my selections together while they are mostly still on the table. When I woke from that TV nap the dog had to go out and by the time I finished with that I was wide awake again. If I sleep now I'll likely be late. So I figured I might as well blog instead. By this afternoon I'll truly be slumping over slumping.