Hot summer sun

It sure has been hot! Spring started off on the cool side here, it warmed up a bit and then it cooled back off again. That is until a couple of weeks ago. We went from relatively mild temperatures to the high 90s overnight. No complaints though, this ares was spared from the damaging tornado outbursts and flooding was minimal compared to the Mississippi River valley. I thought it was a good time to bring the sun back out-perhaps if I paid it a tribute it might ease off a bit--no luck yet.

I've done this design a couple of times before, but the balance of the completed piece wasn't quite right so I made a small modification. By scanning it and creating a mirror of the side I liked better I was able to join the two halves together--that's why the numbering system of the pieces above looks a bit strange. I also increased the size as well. Completed, this one measures at 10 1/4 inches diameter, about 26cm.

I chose to use dense yellow glass for the center of the sun along with the smaller yellow rays. The orange glass is called 'wispy', its more translucent with a little bit of white streaked into it. For the background, I chose a textured teal green colored glass that's really pretty sparkly when the sun or any background light hits it.

With the copper foil, or Tiffany method of stained glass work, all the pieces are wrapped with foil--that is except for the outer edge. Where the foiled pieces butt up to each other a bead of solder will be used to bond them together. Once one side has been soldered completely, the piece is flipped and the backside is soldered as well.

How do you measure the sun? With a tape measure, of course. Here I was measuring how much lead came, a type of lead framing I would need to wrap around the piece.

I wasn't quite sure how I wanted to finish the piece. I knew I didn't want to leave it natural with silver solder showing. And black patina applied to the metals wasn't what I wanted, either. I compromised and used both copper and black patinas. The black was applied to the lead came that wraps around the suncatcher along with the solder lines closest to the outer edge. The solder around the sun and the rays was treated with copper for a warm glow.

A wonderful day for some time away

Yesterday was such a nice day to get outside for a little while and do some wintertime exploring. We've gotten lucky and have been blessed with some warmer weather (40 degrees!) and have been thawing out from our recent snow event in West Tennessee. I've gotten bored with checking out locations on my side of the Tennessee River and decided I need a change of scenery. I took a short journey of a few miles to the other side of the river to Mousetail Landing State Park, located on the banks of the Tennessee River.

As soon as we hopped out of the car we were treated to a wonderful natural phenomena. This is sun dog, formed by ice crystals that act like prisms and bend the light rays of the sun. It remained visible for quite some time, finally disappearing--time to start looking at other things.

We are gifted with so many different kinds of trees in this area. Above is a sweet gum tree with its seed pods hanging like holiday ornaments. The name for this tree originates from the resin like substance found under its bark which is scraped and gathered and in older times was used for its medicinal value as well as for a type of chewing gum.

A closer view of the sweet gum seed pods. Pretty little prickly things they are.

Another abundant tree found in this area is the sycamore. Its smooth light colored trunk makes it stand out among the hardwoods.

The fruit, or seed pod of the sycamore tree, another lovely ornament from nature.

Although quite and peaceful now, come summertime and this area will be bustling with activity. There's rustic campsites available here and these waters will be filled with all kind of watercraft from bass boats to floating party barge pontoons. Jet skiers can have fun out in the main channel of the Tennessee River, this area is a no wake zone.

The sky kept giving us wonderful clouds and the angle of the sun made the shore glow with color as well.

Like lightning bolts coming from above, these Hackberry branches still held some of their tasty berries. Also known as Sugarberry, I don't know how tasty they are...but they are a favorite of wintering birds. Mother Nature provides for its creatures.

Falling over due to shoreline erosion, come soon this tree will be in the water where it will provide cover for small fish and other aquatic creatures.

Here's a tree that if you bumped into it accidentally you would surely remember it. Its the thorny Honey Locust. I don't know if the thorns fall of the truck come spring but I know I've walked through this area a number of times in the summer and don't remember these being here. I'll have to check back in a few months and find out.

Looking like a squished black banana, this is the seed pod from the Honey Locust tree.

Standing out of the crowd with its wonderful green leaves is this American Holly. Providing winged creatures with cover during the cold months of winter makes this tree valuable in the natural landscape.

Lovely red berries from the holly had all fallen to the ground where they will still be consumed by wildlife.

We were just about ready to leave when I spotted this barge heading downriver in the main channel of the Tennessee. All of these sites made for a wonderful day out.

Happy Springtime

Yea, spring is officially here! The birds are singing, the flowers are blooming and I even saw my first butterfly a week or so ago--a Mourning Cloak. It moved away much too quickly for me to get a picture of it, either that or I'm pretty rusty in the bug chasing department. Something I'll need to work on.

So, of course I had to put a butterfly together.

I was undecided on the colors that I wanted to use for this project. At first it was going to be a white/yellow daisy. I decided at the last minute to change the flower to more of a Black-eyed Susan type sunflower.
Spread out--the process of wrapping all the glass pieces with copper foil. At this point I was unsure of the colors--separately they were all pretty bright with the exception of the pale purple background. I was afraid that the end result would end up looking like a bag of fruity candy.
Pinned down and ready for solder. Once all the pieces have been handcut, grinded to fit, wrapped with foil the first side can be soldered together.

Flip it over and solder the backside

Black patina to change the bright shiny solder to a delicate calm dark grey

Soldered to the back is a single loop and a bit of chain for hanging. I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out. If I were to do this again I would use a few different colors for the butterfly
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I also been wanting to do a project using purple glass. After some thought I decided that I had better do it now, before the leaves come in on the trees. I have a terribly hard time photographing purples and reds in the summer due to the green leaves distorting the color of the glass-they usually turn to mucky murky browns.

Even without leaves on the trees I've had a hard time getting pictures that I'm happy with of this new suncatcher. The center is a clear round faceted jewel surrounded by three shades of purple glass--all Waterglass from the Spectrum Glass Co. I've pulled the color samples right from their webside and posted them below.

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Its been an amazing week!

Its been one of the best weeks ever! My good fortune started on the 4th, when I entered
Jen Maestre's 'guess how many pencils I've got' game on Etsy's Etc forum. I'm not normally a competitive person, but looking back at the thread I think I put in the most entries! The rules were to guess within 100 pencils, I guessed at 41,653 with the right number being 41,560. That's a serious amount of pencils!! I can't believe she counted them all~I think I would loose track at 28 and have to start over.
My winning prize is this wonderful leaf pendant made out of --what else--pencils!! Its fantastic and has now become my good luck charm.



If you are not familiar with Jen's work, she makes amazing sculptures and jewelry out of pencils. Her art is so wonderful and unique. Click here for a link to her personal website.
Jen also sent me a card featuring one of her pencil sculptures, 'Kraken', which will now join the 'Wall of Love' in my studio~kitty corner to the birthday card I won from Celtic Cat last year.

All this excitement made my outside kitty friend, Junior, so happy he wanted the world to see his beautiful white belly as he enjoyed rolling around in the leaves.
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My good fortune continued on the 9th when my Spring Pastels Window Panel was one of the featured items in Etsy Finds: Spring Ahead.
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To round out this incredible week, on the 11th my hummingbird suncatcher was a featured item in the ByHand spotlight.
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I'm feeling so lucky from this past week's good fortune you had better believe that I bought a ticket for tonight's Powerball game! If I should disappear, please know that I'm having a wonderful time but I'll be back to have a give away of my entire shop.

Hello, Yellow!

They are popping now! After a few days of warmer that what we've had temperatures, the daffs in my yard are opening up like crazy. Such a welcome sign~~spring might finally be here. Last year, we had snow in March~~~this year we'll probably have snow in April.

This is probably my favorite clump. These are actually in my neighbor's paved driveway. They come up every year and they seem to say that there's just no stopping the beauty of nature.

This large clump is in my backyard~in a spot that gets a lot of sunshine. Its wonderful to look out my kitchen window and see all these bright happy faces outside.

There's few things that bring me more joy then witnessing the reawakening of Mother Earth.

New glass for this week--How about some red

I've been wanting to build something red for some time now, but I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do--if I wanted to recreate something I've already done or something brand new. Since I've got square geometric panels in my shop already I figured it would fun to put together something round.
This is a brand new design for my Etsy shop-- it started out as most of my creations do--scribbling and doodling, erasing and scribbling some more in a very small size and then recreating a pattern in a larger size.

Late last year, I ordered some beautiful glass teardrop jewels from the great folks over at
Harmony Glass. I've dealt with them for a few years now and they are just fantastic--super fast shipping and excellent customer service. So, the idea was to use the jewels and alternate them with bigger pieces of glass in the same shape as the jewels.


The center is a smooth round glass jewel surrounded by textured cherry red glass--textured side facing forward. I like this effect-it gives the finished piece some added interest when its hanging up, especially at night once the sun goes down and there's no light coming through it.

The alternating red glass pieces are wavy Waterglass with a gentle texture resembling slow moving water. I've also included 3 different textures of clear glass for this piece.

I've used the same textured side up effect on the border for the red glass, I've left the clear accents textured side down.

41 inches of lead? Even though this piece measures 13 1/4 inches diameter that's what it took to wrap this piece up. Once it was wrapped up with lead, I soldered two loops to the backside of the lead--one at 10 o'clock and one at 2 o'clock for the chain to attach to.
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While I had the red glass out I thought I would put together another diamond shaped beveled panel. These glass bevels are so lively, when you walk past this piece the bevels just shimmer and shine. The center is a 2 inch bevel surrounded by 1 inch bevels and cherry red glass cut to 1x2 inches. For the outer border I've used 1 1/2 x 1 1/2 inch bevels in the corners along with 4 x 1 1/2 bevels. I had this piece hanging inside my house for day and it was fun when the sun hit it just right--I had little rainbows all over the floor from the prismatic effect of the bevels.

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Spring is slowly starting to make its way here. Its been such a long cold winter but today we were finally able to open the house up for just a little while. Actually, just one window. Then it got too chilly and we had to light the woodstove back up! But, the kitties were very happy to fight over the window to get a sniff of the outdoors.

Wherever you are, have a safe and happy week. My daffodils are popping so I'll be taking some pics of them soon.

Sunny Yellow Daffodils~finally

I hate to admit that I have done no gardening at this house in the three years that we've lived here. I'm super thankful that someone at sometime in the past planted loads and loads of daffodils all over. Finally, they are starting to open up.

I looked at last years pictures and they were all in full bloom by the middle of February. I guess this year's colder than normal temperatures have slowed them down a bit. There's only a few flowers so far that have bloomed.

But, there are lots and lots of buds all over waiting for the right time to pop and show their bright smiling faces to the world. I can't say that I blame them for waiting. I'm keeping my winter coat on for a bit longer, too.