Adventures at Home and Abroad

Making Christmas ornaments seemed like a great idea at the time. Easy small gifts, not too time-consuming, colorful. And, if recipients hated them, they could re-gift or conveniently lose them. What I learned: making small things drives me crazy. These little things are FUSSY to make, and they take much longer than one would presume. I like how most of them turned out, however...ornaments are no longer on my list of things to do!

Piet Mondrian, re-imagined. The original: In progress... The final product. I used decorative soldering to give the flower's center some texture and color.

Well, I learned something new with this last project: creating an abstract piece is a thousand times harder than following a realistic pattern. I wanted to follow-up my lead came class with an actual project, completed on my own. As ever, I have bins of scrap glass, so I decided to create a piece where I could accomplish two goals: 1) use the lead came method; and 2) use up scrap glass! It sounded rather easy...sort of like putting a puzzle together. The truth is, it was incredibly hard. Balancing colors and pieces of glass into a unified design almost drove me crazy. At first, I thought I could piece things together without a pattern, but that process was a giant failure. So, I forced myself to draw a pattern that I could revise, revise, and revise again. I'm really happy with how it turned out, despite all of my whining...

I took a class at D&L last month and learned how to make leaded stained glass. In other words, use lead came to assemble the pieces instead of copper foil. The lead came method is a thousand years old and is used by artisans worldwide. But, as one might expect, working with lead does present some health hazards, so it is a bit more persnickety than the copper foil method, which is what I learned several years ago. (Most new beginners in stained glass learn the copper foil method.) The only thing I don't like about the lead came method is stretching the lead itself...I still don't have the hang of it. But I did love using the lead to piece everything together. For some reason, the process was more meditative than copper foil. Then, the mudding process (the "glue" that holds the piece together) is messy, but it works. For some reason, the whole process feels more organic. Also, you don't have to solder as much, which makes me happy. I'm not usually a per...

In this case, I'm not sure the vision translated well. The tile captured the flow of the water so well, and its motion. I think, to be somewhat critical, I should not have been so literal in translating the tile's design to stained glass. I should have simplified the design a bit more. There are too many wave lines so the visual is muddied a bit. And that's a valuable lesson to learn.

I found a tile that I liked, and decided to see if I could turn it into a stained glass piece. It's relatively small (8 x 14), but I love how it came out. I was able to use some glass that really brought the design to life.

The truth is, I have no writing update. I've put Elvira on the shelf. For how long, I'm not sure. It may be forever, or I may revisit her after I move past the genealogy that's been sucking the life out of me. Every time I visit Dad, I ship myself more of Memaw's files and books. I promised him I'd go through everything at my own pace, and determine what we want to keep and what I can toss. Honestly, I can sit at the computer for hours staring at Ancestry.com and trying to match their crowd-sourced records with Memaw's work. And I must say, her work is better, more exacting. I'm so impressed at her labors. That woman spent 50+ years traveling to a gazillion county courthouses to look up land records, wills, and birth/marriage/death certificates. It was always a labor of love, but it obviously kept her engaged in her world for a lot longer than most people. So far, I've learned two things: 1) don't ever trust the family trees on Ancestry...peopl...