For a year and a half, I'd intended to take an old, chipped, brown ceramic urn to the thrift store. It had been Left Behind, complete with fake pussy willows, in the entryway of the house when we moved in. In some kind of feat of selective blindness, we just left it to sit there for a year. I finally moved it out to the garage--to Thrift Store Pile #2 (#1 had, miraculously, made it to an actual thrift store).Meanwhile, buried in a crowded back closet of my brain, I knew I wanted to try some mosaics to use up some of the scrap glass I accumulate as a by product of stained glass work. I'm not sure why or when, but the mosaic idea bumped into the discarded-urn brain cell and I went out to look at it again.
After some prep work, cutting the scrap glass into little pieces and putting them into old peanut-butter jars (usually in front of the TV during Masterpiece Theater, or some such) I was getting anxious to try it out. I painted the urn white to seal it, then set up my little side project in the living room, since it was kind of chilly out in the shop.
Then I began to play. With no design in mind, I just started. I worked a couple of hours at the end of most days, sticking little pieces of glass onto the urn with glue, changing the design daily as I went, depending on the colors I had available. Turns out, the thing has a much larger surface area than I'd anticipated. And I'd accumulated much more in the shades of blue and green, brown and gray, than in red, purple and orange.
Finally, I'd covered the whole surface. That's the third photo you see. Yesterday, I grouted it, and today, voila! I'm pretty happy with the result (photos 4 and 5) and that it had cost so little (um, well, except time). Now my beady little eyes are on the lookout for other hapless objects I might transform with little bits of glass. And don't stand still too long around here, or who knows what part of you might look different by the time you leave!
It was cathartic to clean up the mess in the living room. Like remodeling. So nice to see it tidier, again. But who knows for how long?
