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elanya at 09:53pm on 18/11/2013 under forsyth, glass, night vale, photography, steuben, uart, work
elanya at 09:53pm on 18/11/2013 under forsyth, glass, night vale, photography, steuben, uart, workI was re-listening to The traveler (Night Vale ep 17), and realized that it actually described my today pretty well. I mean, I go through a lot of latex gloves at work anyway, but today was a bit of an ordeal @_@ maybe that is why I'm so wiped today - that + bees :p
To recap my life briefly - I work in a glass museum. It's really cool. I have spent the past... 3 or four weeks, maybe? Cataloging Steuben art glass. It's fucking gorgeous. If you want an idea of what it is like... Here you go!
I just out away one that looks like this:
And we have a lot of the gold stuff too:
Those are the most ubiquitous colours - blue and gold aurene, but we have a lot of other stuff as well:
Red Aurene:
Verre de Soie (silk glass - possibly my favourite):
Pretty sure we have this exact vase:
And this, which, btw, is at least a foot tall, maybe closer to a foot and a half. That's a lot of perfume! Ours doesn't have a sticker on it:
We have some intarsia too, which is pretty and all the more impressive then you stop and wonder how the hell they even did that - the coloured patterns are not applied afterward, they are blown into the glass:
...Then again, sorry Steuben, they can't all be winners. Art nouveau fail:
And so on - lots of shinies!
Anyway, I usually unpack a box, take all my notes, put all my notes into the database, take picture, process all the pictures, and re-pack all the things. That is pretty much all there is to my job most of the time. Sometimes I do a little minor conservation or labeling/relabeling for variety.
Today I was helping/doing a photoshoot for some marketing materials for some of the exhibits going up after Christmas. This meant getting out about ten different boxes, some of which I haven't gotten to and so are packed horribly, and pulling one thing out of each box, moving all the stuff into the other room, setting up all the photo stuff in the studio, working with the marketing lady to get shots of all of these things that are much fancier than I usually do (the shots I take are generally nice, but they are mostly for identification purposes, whereas these will be on postcards and in brochures and such). Anyway, it was a lot more intensive, and I was kneeling on concrete pretty much all afternoon to get all the photos. I think we more or less got all the shots we needed, but it was after 5 when we finished and I didn't look at them all yet. I also have to put everything away tomorrow, including dealing with all the stuff that came out of really poorly packed boxes that no one has looked at in at least 5 years and possibly more like 10 :p
As for the latex gloves, fingerprints leave permanent marks on glass really easily - especially fancy art glass that has had various surface treatments applied to make it iridescent and such - and we have gloves (technically nitrite and not latex) to keep from getting prints on. You can't use the white cotton ones that are okay for other art handling because they are too slippery. But the gloves get warm - especially when you are doing photography with hot lights - and I went through a lot of them because my hands were sweating so much, yum!
So all in all, my Monday was long and tiring, but didn't harm me, and I went through a lot of gloves. Thanks, Night Vale!
To recap my life briefly - I work in a glass museum. It's really cool. I have spent the past... 3 or four weeks, maybe? Cataloging Steuben art glass. It's fucking gorgeous. If you want an idea of what it is like... Here you go!
I just out away one that looks like this:
And we have a lot of the gold stuff too:
Those are the most ubiquitous colours - blue and gold aurene, but we have a lot of other stuff as well:
Red Aurene:
Verre de Soie (silk glass - possibly my favourite):
Pretty sure we have this exact vase:
And this, which, btw, is at least a foot tall, maybe closer to a foot and a half. That's a lot of perfume! Ours doesn't have a sticker on it:
We have some intarsia too, which is pretty and all the more impressive then you stop and wonder how the hell they even did that - the coloured patterns are not applied afterward, they are blown into the glass:
...Then again, sorry Steuben, they can't all be winners. Art nouveau fail:
And so on - lots of shinies!
Anyway, I usually unpack a box, take all my notes, put all my notes into the database, take picture, process all the pictures, and re-pack all the things. That is pretty much all there is to my job most of the time. Sometimes I do a little minor conservation or labeling/relabeling for variety.
Today I was helping/doing a photoshoot for some marketing materials for some of the exhibits going up after Christmas. This meant getting out about ten different boxes, some of which I haven't gotten to and so are packed horribly, and pulling one thing out of each box, moving all the stuff into the other room, setting up all the photo stuff in the studio, working with the marketing lady to get shots of all of these things that are much fancier than I usually do (the shots I take are generally nice, but they are mostly for identification purposes, whereas these will be on postcards and in brochures and such). Anyway, it was a lot more intensive, and I was kneeling on concrete pretty much all afternoon to get all the photos. I think we more or less got all the shots we needed, but it was after 5 when we finished and I didn't look at them all yet. I also have to put everything away tomorrow, including dealing with all the stuff that came out of really poorly packed boxes that no one has looked at in at least 5 years and possibly more like 10 :p
As for the latex gloves, fingerprints leave permanent marks on glass really easily - especially fancy art glass that has had various surface treatments applied to make it iridescent and such - and we have gloves (technically nitrite and not latex) to keep from getting prints on. You can't use the white cotton ones that are okay for other art handling because they are too slippery. But the gloves get warm - especially when you are doing photography with hot lights - and I went through a lot of them because my hands were sweating so much, yum!
So all in all, my Monday was long and tiring, but didn't harm me, and I went through a lot of gloves. Thanks, Night Vale!
sleepy
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