My husband found this u-tube video of Adam Savage’s office. What do swords and movie props have to do with knitting/crocheting design? I’m getting there; they remind me of the glass blower Nyack, NY.
Sometime in the late 1970’s my Mom read in the Rockland Journal that a glass blower had set up shop temporarily in downtown Nyack. She suggested to my babysitter that she take all of us kids to watch him in the mid-afternoon when he didn’t have regular paying customers.
- Peter Layton practises an ancient art. Photograph: Sarah Lee
It was cool and dark inside the shop, perhaps like a blacksmith he needed to see some color from the fire? He was making a set of wine glasses when we entered, we looked around the front of the store, he couldn’t answer many questions while blowing, not that that kept us quiet. I was confused at his displays in the front of the store. Some things were labeled for sale, but one unlabeled thing looked like an egg with frozen bubbles inside it on a wine-glass stem. Was it a futuristic building with bubble elevators? You couldn’t drink out of it. It wasn’t in scale with Lego. Why did he let it take up space on his selling floor?
I asked what the egg-thing was for? When he was done switching the wine glass from one rod to another so he could work on the other side of it, he explained it was a mistake, but such interesting one, he left it where he could see it.
For years I wondered at keeping an egg on display that you couldn’t sell. But I keep all my swatches (well, the ones I don’t frog for more yardage.) And sometimes, the experiments that didn’t quite work out the way I thought they would have more to tell me later when I’m trying something else.
Do you keep experimental swatches? Do they take their time to talk to you?