Around Christmas, a couple of years ago, a friend of mine
said"When I returned to my bench I couldn’t find the ruby, it
was then I realized that I had swallowed it"! I told him if he
waited a couple of days he could probably recover it, but he
prefered a new stone.
This same guy had a customers emerald and diamond ring for
months, He looked everywhere, after awhile he went back to
quench the flask,he then noticed something sparkling in the
crucible. There were diamonds and emeralds in the crucible, he
had melted the ring accidentaly!
The weirdest place I have found something that popped off my
bench was on the top of a window frame. The stupidest place was
when I left a stone in the pocket of a shirt I took to the
cleaners.
I wonder if anyone else has any interesting stories about where
something was lost or missplaced?
P.S. Someone told me that William Harper spoke at a SNAG
conference a little while ago and said that he had to give up
enameling because it wrecked his eyes. Does anyone know
anything about this?
While I don’t recall for sure, and might be wrong here, my
memory of that talk (It was at the Cincinatti conference, in '93)
is that he’d lost sight in one eye in some accident not related
to enamelling itself. I don’t recall the details though. I seem
to remember it wasn’t even a workshop accident at all, but as I
said, I could be wrong. However, in general, staring into kilns
is exposing your eyes to higher levels of heat and infrared than
normal work does. If you find it uncomfortable, you might
consider the use of sunglasses that keep the light levels and
heat levels to a comfortable level. There are several types of
glasses sold to glassblowers, for example, that do this very
well.
…how about losing a strand of beads and then finding them
under the waterbed mattress when we moved? Beads gone 6 months,
bed up for three years…and the beads were in the center, not
the edge… Hmmm.