Crashing

It is one of the busiest times of the year for me as the long silence can attest to. I have been working in the studio a bit, mostly just finishing up some commission work and doing some annealing for hire.

I recently finished up my first repair commission. A friend of mine had the cap break part way off her pendant stained glass lamp. At first, I thought this would be a very easy task, but the longer I worked on it, the harder it became. Stripping the old solder and foil off the glass was a bit of a challenge, but getting it off the cap was even more difficult. Eventually I learned, through trial and error, how to do it. And clearly, if I had known how to take the actual electric fixture out of the equation, it would have been soooooo much easier.

It was a long operation, partly because we undertook a studio rebuild right in the middle of it, partly because of my inexperience at repair, and in large part because of creeping equipment failure. But I finished the job and it looked really good. I was very proud of my work and sweated the whole way in the car, driving down to North Carolina, that it would get damaged somehow from the way I had packed it.

This lamp must be cursed. Not five minutes after I returned it to its rightful owner, after having spending six months in my shop under repair, it tumbled to the ground and broke. That crash damn near broke my heart.