An idea

            Glass is neat stuff. I love the way it is transparent or translucent. For the most part, clay is an opaque medium. (There are notable exceptions - Google Margaret O'Rorke if you want to see some amazing translucent porcelain!) Glass, on the other hand, lets light all the way through it.
            I've been thinking about glass for maybe a year now. I'm curious about working with it; I'll probably try sometime. I used to be afraid of the idea of working with glass, because you have to get it hot to make it move. Now that I've gotten used to the burners on a gas kiln, however, I'm not afraid at all of the little propane torches used to make beads. Glass blowing is another beast, but having stoked a wood kiln near the end of the firing, I'm figuring I could be ok with a big glass kiln too.
            I'm thinking of what I could make with both glass and clay, in one piece. I don't know how feasible it is to attach glass to clay. But glaze is basically glass and it sticks just fine... so maybe there is a way to get more normal glass to stick to fired clay. And if there is, well then one could make all sorts of neat things!
            So here's my latest crazy idea. I want to make wine glasses out of clay. Doing this with clay in the first place is probably kind of silly, because a) wine glasses need to be super thin to be nice, and it's much harder to make things that are super thin than things that are, well, normal pot thickness; b) it's much harder to make thin things with multiple parts, like a stem plus a foot plus a cup, which is what wine glasses are; c) if I want the glass (goblet? if it's not glass, can I call it a glass?) to be translucent then I'd better make it with translucent porcelain, which is harder to hand build with too. So basically it's a silly idea. But, I want to try it anyway. Because if it works it will be really, really cool.
            And then I had my idea. What if I use normal clay, or whatever clay I want I guess, and just make the stem and the foot out of clay? And then make the cup part glass? Or get a glass artist who actually knows how to do it to make the cup part - that might be a better idea since I don't know how to do that really. Then I could make the stem the shape of a tree, and the glass part could be colored glass, in fall colors so that it's like the leaves of the tree. The foot part would have the tree roots.
            Here's a sketch I made of this idea:

            You might want to click on the picture and look at it in a larger size so you can see it better. Now, this particular idea of the tree glass is a little complicated because I don't know how you'd make the glass cup so that it fits inside the tree branches, and I don't know whether it's possible to melt the glass just enough to make it stick to the clay without slumping in an unattractive way. A simpler idea that might be a better place to start would be to make a clay foot and stem that does not wrap around the cup part so much, so that the cup can basically be set on the stem without having to be the right shape to nestle in. I might come up with a theme other than the tree that doesn't involve so much nestling.
            This idea is so exciting! But I think I need to find a glass artist to collaborate with. Don't get me wrong, I fully intend to spend some time playing around with glass myself. I'm interested in collaborating with someone who knows what they are doing, however, as I think two people with differing expertise might be able to craft more exciting and awesome things than one person familiar with one medium.
            What do you think, readers? I know you are out there because I can see the statistics on Blogger. I want to hear what you have to say; otherwise it's like I'm talking into a vacuum here. You don't have to know a lot about clay to have interesting ideas I'd like to hear about. Or questions... I'd love to answer some questions!