This past weekend, I took a stained glass intensive at The Vinery in Madison where they take a 4-5 week class and smoosh it into a two day seminar. It was fantastic. It was so great to spend seven hours working on something. This is definitely the way I prefer to craft. We did take a lunch break in the middle but I really loved coming right back to work on my piece. The Vinery is a fantastic studio and everyone I met who taught or worked in the store were so nice.  I definitely recommend that studio and I signed up for a lamp class pretty much right away!

Now, the issue I have when I work on a piece is that I’m so happy with the way things are fitting all the way up until I foil it.  And even though I can’t really tell how things are going to look on the board (since no light can shine through), based on how quilts come together, I’m pretty confident that the colors will work together.

Actually, even after I foil it, although I can see all these HUGE gaps, I’m still pretty happy with it.But then I solder it and then for some reason, it seems like all my hard work was for naught because it just doesn’t look that great. Mostly it has to do with my soldering and my being new to it which I hope to make better as I make more pieces.  There’s definitely an adjustment period after I solder where I have to get used to how it looks. But once I clean it up, polish it, and hold it up to the light, I’ve usually changed my mind.I ended up taking it to work where I have a giant window I can decorate. I kinda love it now. 🙂

Every year for the past four years, I’ve been attending an art retreat in Columbus, OH called Artiscape. It’s a great mixed media art retreat put together by Lisa Ohmer of European Papers and the variety of classes run the gamut of paper art to metalsmithing. This year’s theme was Venetian Nights and due to only having 5 days of vacation this year, I  went for three days instead of my usual four. It meant less classes but I was grateful just to be able to go at all.

This year’s theme was Venice Unmasked! and I desperately wanted to create some artist trades to give out to people.  I’d never been able to make any the previous years and so I had never been able to receive all the beautiful art everyone else had made.

In the end, I ended up with little wooden masks that I laser cut, sanded, and stained.

I decorated one in particular and entered it into the Art Trades contest and it ended up winning in the Art – Miscellany category!

Better than that though was all the cool little pieces of art I was able to trade for those masks. This is just from the first day of trading! I really enjoyed all the effort people took to make these.In addition the the trade contest, I made an entry for the auction which included a green beaded crown, a sea themed beaded bracelet and a decorated frame with a poem I wrote about the pieces.

Well, there was a bit of a bidding war at the end between a wedding and prom and the pieces ended up getting the highest bid of the silent auction. It was pretty neat to find out the crown was going to be used in a wedding ceremony! But beyond all that were the classes.  I was only able to take three this year and I was not very good at taking pictures but here are a couple of pictures of some of the things I worked on.

This is polymer clay! With some transfer foil and a texture I rolled onto it. I was sort of mesmerized by the foil transfer technique but overall, I’d say that polymer clay is not really my bag of tea. But I did buy a finished piece from the instructor at the art fair on Sunday which is so detailed that I really do appreciate the art and skill involved in polymer clay art. 

Over all a great weekend and I didn’t even mention the group dinners, the marketplace, and all the wonderfully artistic people I got to spend time with. A great weekend and I’m looking forward to 2017’s event!

2016 was a great year for my crafting challenge. I managed to craft a little bit each night almost 85%  of the time in March.  Last year, I crafted about 47% before abandoning the challenge. One thing that helped greatly was having a class scheduled during the month. It helped with not having to come up with something to do each night which can be an issue despite having a slew of kits I could have worked on. And stained glass being a relatively new skill, it was nice to learn something new versus just working on the same old crafts.

Finished stained glass panel + mini cat tax!

Foil night at my stained glass class. Next week, soldering and zinc came!

Easter eggs – Galaxy edition.