In other news, signed up and completed the class on Australian Roll-Ups.  In this class I finally learned to fuse glass, that is where you cut it up and put it together in a kiln, cook it, shape it, and in general make big glass tiles with patterns in it.  This will be useful for playing with glass at home, plates here I come.  The other wonderful knowledge to come out of this class is how to take those tiles you fuse and then pick them up onto a blown glass piece. This allows for much more detail in pieces.  My first one was, I admit, rushed and maybe a little uninspired in terms of the fused tile I made.  But the pick-up was great and I actually made my first non-cheat bowl. 

For the second piece, I created a birch tree pattern. For this pattern I tried to mimic the birch wood pattern while still make the eventual piece blowable.  The difficulty: White is very stiff (slow to heat, hard to move) and black is very soft (super quick to heat and moves a little too well).  Much trouble ensued in trying to get the two colors to play nice together.  Needless to say, having learned this new and awesome way to play with glass I will continue bringing more patterns into my work.  Expect to see tons of birch patterns.  Something about it really appeals to me.