#picturing this as one of the Several heated conversations up at the lighthouse on the last day. probably literal minutes before max resets

[whimsicalcotton]

Angst on the Radio Anon

Tee hee found some dialogue from Scherzo 8th Doctor Big Finish play) that works way too well:

"I would've given anything to save you. I gave everything."

"I know! But I didn't want it if I couldn't have you too!"

anon you've inflicted 100000 points of psychic damage onto me and now i'm going to inflict it on everyone else

[katpowers]

So far, I think May has been my favorite month of 2023, and this stained glass commission was a big part of that. A friend of a friend of a friend who is also connected in several other roundabout ways, Liz, emailed me on the 18th of April to ask if I had any mosaic pieces for sale. A woman she worked with would soon be retiring, and they were trying to find her a gift. We went on to talk via zoom with a couple of her other colleagues, wherein I floated the idea of working in stained glass. We also found that several of them, including the woman retiring, had been at a series the mosaic workshops I led a few years ago, commemorating the life of a woman very dear to them. What a special connection.

Afterwards I sent them three sketches plus the book border idea, based on Virginia Woolf, books, and the English countryside. Our mutual friend Carla suggested that I look into some quotes by Virginia Woolf (who I have really yet to read, though I’ve just started The Lighthouse), as many are visually suggestive. Liz’s colleagues found the following: “And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees.”-from The Lighthouse, and “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.” from A Writer’s Diary. I will keep an eye out in future readings of Woolf to pull these elements together, to perhaps glean a title.

Below are some of the pictures of the process, including my ‘learning edges.’ After grinding down the sharp edges of each piece of glass guided by its affixed pattern, I found the pieces did not fit together perfectly. Instead of cutting them down to fit, as the patterns are cut to take the diameter of the copper foil into account, I continued on, cleaning and then soldering them together- only to find that they indeed still didn’t fit as expected. At this point I had the impulse to abandon this attempt and begin again. I spent a good chunk of time on Monday and Tuesday re-designing, tracing and cutting out the pattern (twice) before looking at the first version again, and sitting down with it a little longer. It ended up being so much more workable than I had anticipated. I heated up the solder at each book-end joint and removed the sad thin came border, and copper along the pages of the book, and then re-soldered fresh came with a deeper well that more closely resembled the width of seams between the glass. I filled in the gaps in the design with newly cut and foiled pieces. I learned how to have a bit of a conversation with it.

After handing this project off to Liz last night, I realized that, though Ive been doing site-specific work for a few years, somehow this piece confirmed how thoroughly I enjoy the process of designing specific pieces for specific people or places. I love the conversation I get to have with the person who wants the piece, and that later on, the potential conversation I imagine someone can have with or about each piece wherever it is in the world.

I think one of the drawbacks to this experimental methodology is that things take time, often creative ideas are slower to arrive, and sometimes the same goes for ideas about materials or technique. I am thinking here of a friend’s entryway, promised tentatively over last winter, which I’m still working through in my mind. Just thought that the peacock feathers she wants don’t have to be made from a homogenous material, but instead could be a representation of the time we have lived, and carry a history of their own, so that there will be a story that goes along with it. What is a story? My answer now is different than when I studied fiction writing twenty years ago. I find glints and threads in objects passed through space, given and received. They are both enormous and insignificant, encountered and remembered. Thinking thought-fully about future projects.

Thanks to my friend Judy for showing me her foiling techniques, as well as all the YouTubers whose videos I continue to devour; and thanks to Mr. Jardine for holding the stained glass in the photo above. Thanks to Liz, Liz, Donny, Carla, Mike, Dale, and all others who connected us. I am truly in love with this Chicago community of makers, and am glad to be part of it (albeit one in her recluse/hermit phase).