Well, I haven't posted in a while. It is not because I haven't been doing glass or gardening, but it is because We Moved! That's right, we have left our beautiful garden in the city to move to lovely little Ephraim, Utah. My wife and I met at Snow College and ever since we graduated and left, we have wanted to go back. I transferred to the University of Utah and earned a Masters Degree in Parks, Recreation and Tourism and have been running swimming pools and recreational programs for Salt Lake County Parks and Recreation for the last 8 years. But, this spring a position opened up here at Snow running the swimming pool and teaching the aquatic classes. So, we moved. We are excited to be here and love it all so far.
I have always wanted to build a straw bale home, and this move will allow me to finally build one. We need to sell our home in Salt Lake before we can, but we are gearing up for it now. I have been sharpening up my knowledge of building practices especially those surrounding straw bales and am getting pretty stoked up about it all. In the mean time I have still been doing some glass work, but not so much gardening as we are just renting for now. As things progress, I will be posting as much as possible to keep everyone up to date.
In the mean time, here are a few pictures of some stained glass that can be found at the Ephraim Co-op. This is a location that allows crafters from around the area to sell their wares to the community. Besides the stained glass I have also placed there some bottle vases, earrings, and necklaces.
I found a recipe online for a homemade liquid stringer. Liquid stringer is glass powder mixed with a liquid agent that allows the glass to be squeezed out of a plastic bottle onto a sheet of glass. In my case I used Aloe Vera, the green kind used for sunburns. Mix the Aloe with powdered glass and a little water and fill squeeze bottles with the stuff. Then you can “paint” sheets of glass by squeezing out the liquid stringer. These pictures are some of the trials that we ran. I had my wife and 2 year old help me with the designs. 
They were fired to 1400F which left them the exact same shape they came out of the bottle with no slumping at all. Next time I will try 1450F to see if they will melt down a little. It does give a cool 3D effect. 
The crushed glass came as always from bottles. The colors are blue, sapphire, green, brown, dark green, and yellow green. 
