Glass mosaic tiles

Three more tiles to hang around the mirror in my bathroom... which brings us to a total of 5 so far.... at this rate I will be done with that decorative project in..... 18 months?

three blue-ish pendants

Another experiment in photography using different backgrounds but the same lighting.... it still amazes me how different the same piece of glass can look just by changing the background material.... there's dark green leather (my couch), a grey polyester blend shirt, and a fairly loosely knit pillowcase from India. (the ones not pictured here were a bright blue spandex, and a couple other darker textiles)

FINALLY. Some successful(ish) use of reds/oranges/yellows!



(although lost in the photograph, in real life when you look at the one onthe right, it kind of looks like a medical photograph looking down someone's esophagus or something... hunh.... i need to practice making more successful 'vortex' style glass, but this isn't half bad for a first attempt after just *reading8 about how to do it.... :)

a work sketch (or five!)

Last one first.... a smushed bug in the style of the smushed fairy books & calendars...



Then a series of the common angry bugs that find their way into all of my notebooks....
One of these things is not like the others....
three are mine, one is not...
can you tell which is which?
:) i love them all equally!




The correct answer is..... Mischevious Racoon created by James Jonathon Jafolla (jjjafolla@uwalumni.com). He can do some cool stuff (or so he tells me) - you should check him out.

Round 1.... I was tryign to use warm colors (reds, oranges and yellows)... and... I decided I don't really enjoy the orange effect I was getting this afternoon. I've put orange away for now.




Then I took a small break and here are the results of Round 2... in round two i selected a whole different set of colors out of the box... which (since they came from some random guy near Milwaukee) I have no idea what colors are supposed to turn out like what or if they are the kind of color that needs an oxidizing flame or a reducing flame, so.... the results of my playing with hot glass are likely to be pretty hit-or-miss until I figure out what's what in the box of glass wonders :) I do quite like the 'celestial' effects I achieved in Round 2... coming up this week? attempting to repeat an "effect" or a "design" in roughly the same size as each other... wish me luck.

boro pendants

here's what I did this afternoon.... notice I started out awful, got a little bit more interesting.... then got worse again (#5) and then the last one was OK again... also, that first one took a bit over an hour (eeeek!) but the next ones took less and less time until I was down to about 15 minutes per pendant. I would have done more, but my arms got tired (and I got hungry). I guess if I start donig this every other day again, I'll build up my tolerance :)





These are all borosilicate glass (a.k.a. pyrex) which has some qualities that are waaaaaaay different than the soft glass I've been doing up until now. Most noticably different is the reaction of the colors to the flame.... boro does somethign called "striking" and... I still don't have the hang of it..... ALso, boro uses much hotter temperatures and requires adjusting the flame to be an oxidizing flame (rather than neutral)....



And then this was me trying to figure out which background to use... light? or dark? or light? or dark?

What to do with spare watercolors?

Why cut them up and glue them on to previously ugly cards, of course!


(previously these cards had 2 stylized/cartoon-y critters that vaguely resembled cats underneath some of the strategically placed pieces of watercolored paper)