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)

Adorable nephew - check out that smile!

Dancing under a tree? Or falling off a waterfall?

...help me decide which way to hang this....

a bird sitting in a tree... oblivious to the chaos around him

watercolor swirls

arguing dragons

more watercolors..... i did not set out to create arguing dragons, but rather I watercolor colors and stuff together, let them dry and then come back to stare at the blobs of color until I see something interesting in the swirls of color.... then use another media to make whatever *I* see more visible to anyone looking at the piece. In all of the pictures from this week, it was india ink. Next week, I think I will be back to oil pastels.

a watercolor lizard

Not my favorite watercolor of the year, but I may as well post a picture of it.

Stripey Earrings

These were actually made in November... that's how long it is taking me to post these days. yeeesh.

Hmmmmm..... it really *does* feel like google is taking over the world.... but I've switched.... so far so good.... I guess....

Much like the previous post, these aerring follow the same process as the pins, just that I have to try to repeat the design a second time --- which can be more challenging than it looks - don't look too closely at the size of each bend ;) also, I'd say it's even harder to come up with two identical beads in my garage studio, so if you are looking at these earrings, you'll see that they beads are not exactly identical... however, when they are displayed on the opposite sides of someone's head, most people won't notice that they are a little different.

three pins

these pins are incredibly entertaining for me to make. You could say that they are somethign close to 'instant gratification' although, thinking back on it, they are certainly *not* instant. Many steps go into these, starting from making the glass beads out in my garage studio (how will I continue torch work when it's cold outside??? :( to bending the wire, hardening the wire, sharpening the tip of the pine and then cleaning up any scratches or dings i've done to the metal... at any rate, I really enjoy making them.

milky white swarovski earrings

These ended up much more cross shaped than intended. still, they sparkle nicely.

The Angry Bee

cement fun from this summer....

two more light switch covers

there are a couple more... but I ran out of energy for photo editing.... they'll (hopefully) be posted up here tomorrow.