Having You Tube at our fingertips online is such a great resource. You can see just about anything! Music, TV shows, people doing stupid things, and tons of how-to videos. Today’s post sends you over there to check out the video by Randy Comer, showing you how to fuse glass. This video provides some really cool information such as cutting glass, assembling it for a firing, a quick bit about pattern bars, using all the different components that were previously made to assemble a new piece and slumping that piece once it’s been fired. He also gets into why he would fire something more than once, which was after he fired a piece that was draped and then slumped to change the piece a bit. Randy is very good at conveying this information and I think you can get a lot from this. He doesn’t get into actual temperatures that he’s firing at or firing schedules, so I do recommend maybe checking out some other videos on You Tube to find out other information. But do remember that firing schedules for pieces do change and are not the same for every project.
Have you read?
Book Review: Off to the Nursery
One of the best things about the return of warmer weather is getting to plant new flowers and starting the vegetable garden if you have one. Off to the Nursery by Alice Oehr is subtitled “a celebration of gardening, plants and seasons,” and it’s also a celebration of diversity (because gardening is for everyone) and caring for the earth.
The book starts with the work of getting the garden ready for spring, pulling out the old plants and spreading compost made from kitchen scraps. They grab tomatoes and peppers, learn about zucchini and eggplant and explore the tasty world of herbs.
They also look through the seeds, succulents, berries and fruit trees, flowers and aquatic plants, talking about the benefits of different plants and how fun they are to grow. Maybe you can relate to the family buying what seems like way too many plants?
The book was originally published in Australia, so some of the flowers mentioned might not be familiar to your or your kids, but that’s kind of fun, too. You can also use this as an opportunity to talk about which plants in the book can grow where you live and that just like animals, plants have preferred habitats, too.
Illustrations are colorful and the book combines a standard font and a hand written font to make it feel more like a journal about the garden. The illustrations include fun facts and growing tips such as always planting mint in a pot or germinating seeds on a wet paper towel before planting.
If you want to introduce kids to gardening or just talk about what kind of plants can be grown at home where you live (yes to tomatoes, probably no to the kumquat tree), this cute book is a great addition to your spring reading list.
About the book: 30 pages, hardcover. Published 2025 by Scribble US. Suggested retail price $18.95.