My newly renovated studio

Well, it’s been a while since I updated this blog. I’ve mainly been using Facebook to post (occasional) updates. I’ve been having long conversations with myself about the pros and cons of blogging and facebooking. But I have updated my blog software, I have a newly renovated studio, and some other interesting things have been happening, so it’s time I cranked up the old blog again.

Let’s start with my studio. I’ve posted these photos to FB, so you may have already seen them.

I packed up my studio at the beginning of December last year. We started doing the renovations shortly afterwards. We had builders in to do the “big” work, but we did what we could. It was hard, back-breaking work. For weeks and weeks on end. And then I had to wait an extra month until my new, super-professional, heavy-duty extraction fan (melting coloured glass releases lots of toxic fumes) was installed. But I’m back in business now!

My studio was a good place to be, but it was pretty chaotic. This is where I melted glass: hemmed in by lights and shelves, lots of stuff on the table, including my kiln.

This was my messy, cramped studio.

And this is where I kept various bits and pieces, and occasionally did some work with a soldering torch.

Well, anyway, that bit of wall is where we broke through.

The wall with a big hole in it

Then we had another wall built, snaffling some space from the room behind.

The newly added room

I decided that I loved the red walls so much that I repainted them. This time a beautiful deep rich red, that I can’t help thinking of as “bordello red”.

The “bordello” red walls, compared to the old colour

My new storage/workroom is very small, but it’s oh-so functional. I now have a table to work on non-glass stuff, and one entire wall of floor-to-ceiling shelving. Now I can centralise stuff a lot more, instead of having it spread all over the house.

This is my extra work/storage room

I can also do the photography here too, so hopefully that will encourage me to take more photos.

There’s space to do photography too

And this was a sort of “mock-up” of my lampworking table, before the extraction system was installed. That’s a whole different story, for another post.