Wretched Class and Too Much Glass

Spent the day in class learning how to create web sites in Dreamweaver. Taught by a very nice, very knowledgeable man who ought to have taught an advanced class, not one for newbies. Way to long, way to in depth for complex ideas that were interesting but beyond the scope of the class. The 12 hour course is half over and we only got through chapter 1 of 7!

And when I got home, this is what awaited me: too much undone stuff.

I'm for a quick cup of tea and some bad TV.

Hearts To Go

I'm busy gearing up for the new show this weekend in Malvern, PA. We've never been to this show before so I don't know what to expect.
Di has most of the stock up at her place in Pennsylvania, so I'm just puttering around making a couple of new patterns and some hearts.
Last year before Wine in the Woods, a Maryland show, I got heartily sick of making Tumbling Block panels, so I cut up scrap into wacky, freehand hearts. They sold very well. In fact , we sold enough to cover the booth fees and travelling expenses. So since then, before every show, I check out my glass scrap stash and get to work.

I'm sure someday I'll get sick of these too, but so far, so good!

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Daily Chicken Grind

Ah, sigh. I went to feed the girls today and found 40 eggs. That's right, 3 and a half dozen. Now I should point out that my household is very small. I do have friends and family around, but even with their help, I have a lot of eggs each day. On weekends, if I've been lazy, the eggs stay in the nest for a day and poof, come Monday , 40 eggs await.

Rooting Around in the Attic of my Computer

I love computers. But I don't understand them. Someday I'll understand how I managed to delete my trashcan. Since I deleted the trash can, I could not empty it. I filled my entire hard drive . The nice people at the repair shop couldn't fix it either, so they copied my old data into the new computer .

I've been slowly going through the old files, getting rid of junk and generally digitally housecleaning. And so I ran across these. I made these 5 small sun catchers/ ornaments for a wedding. My then 11 year old daughter was the junior bridesmaid at a Wiccan inspired event. The bride had a beautiful butterfly ornament that represented Air to her. She asked if I would make complementary ornaments representing Water, Fire and Earth as well as 2 more in keeping with the occasion for the flower girls. She planned to have the bridesmaids carry these instead of bouquets. I'm particularly pleased with the star and the heart flower, representing Day and Night.

The wedding was beautiful.

I wonder what else I have in those old files...

Homage to Baltimore

Usually I design a new piece of stained glass by drawing a lot, getting frustrated, whining, and playing with glass color combos. This time around, I built the piece earlier than I usually do, since I had limited colors to work with anyway! Most of the stock is at the other studio, but I didn't feel like traveling up there, since I had a class this week in Maryland.

The red roses have an orange cast to them- these are yellow red rather than the grossly named pigeon's blood red. So that meant that most of the colors would have to be in the yellow family in order not to clash.

Baltimore Album Quilt Blocks have several characteristics in common. The designs are often of floral wreaths, baskets and urns of flowers and fruit. The background is usually white. . The flowers are more often red and yellow rather than blue and purples. Of course there's lots of green from the leaves.

So I was pretty set- I used a mus tardy caramel for the basket, indicating the different surfaces by using wispy and textured glass. I had to be careful and select yellow green rather than my usual Kelly or teal greens.

As the red roses are very thick- about 3.8 of an inch in the center, I needed another , thinner element to bridge the visual gap between the roses and the rest of the glass. Without the bright yellow nuggets, the roses would have overpowered the design.

I thought about a white background for the entire square, but this resulted in a static piece. In a fabric quilt, the quilting lines themselves add visual interest to the plain white background. I had some clear swirled glass around that gave me the same unobtrusive texture that fine quilted lines gives to fabric.

I've never seen an album quilt with the elements set on point in a Diamond-in-Square format, much less then sashed in red. But I have seen some with red sashing. So this is really my design variant entirely. Hope you like Homage to Baltimore

Finally Figured Out How To Do This!

So here I am , the less Techno savvy partner in Glass on the Square, the shared stained glass studio I belong to . Since I finally figured out how to do this, I can update everyone without having to learn HTML. We do have a real website, Glassonthesquare.com, of course, but that is for more serious things, like show schedules and new offerings.This is just me, what I'm working on now and , well what frustrates me. So here goes, full speed and ignore that lovely churning white water ....

For the last 2 years or so, Di and I have been re interpreting traditional quilt blocks into glass. Which sounds pretty easy and is not.

Glass is NOT fabric- it does not stretch, it does not fold, it does not come in as many colors, and most of all- glass breaks! I hesitate to remember some of my debacles.

Mostly we have been working on straight forward, geometric pieces. We've done variations on Log Cabins, Flying Geese, Dutchman's Puzzle, Baby Blocks and the like. We had always thought to work on other , less geometric pieces. Di wants to do a series based on Little Red Schoolhouse and I've been dying to make something based on Baltimore Album quilts.

2 weeks ago, I found 1 1/14 inch molded red roses in a little store in New Jersey. They were perfect for the quilt square I had had in mid for a while. I finally got my cutter in gear and the result is above.

Not too shabby for a working draft, if I say so myself!