It's February now. We have a regular rhythm in the shop and Fire Bloom 3 is beginning to take shape.

Unlike our previous Blooms, the rear end of this Bloom is going to be a very visible part of the sculpture. More of the stem is going to show here so we divised a way to make it work nicely. We decided that we would use a medium diameter pipe to slice apart, turn inside out and stick back together, making a faceted surface that resembles a stem.

We have reinforced the inner bowl and made a beautiful and heavy duty scalloped internal bowl that will sit inside the shape that already exists. This is where most of the heat from the fire wil be contacting the metal, so it's very important to keep it as insulated and hefty as possible.

The next step has been to cut-out the side petal, top petal and pieces of the bottom petal or, as we like to call it, the tongue. Here, we have made a double layer and placed the pieces of the tongue on top of the bottom layer of petal. We have tack welded the tongue pieces, the top petal and made a holder for the side petal. Currently, we are patterning and shaping pieces to join the curve from the inner bowl to the bottom petal. It's slow and tedious and doesn't look like much right now, but once it all comes together, it will look great and make alot of sense!!!