These magnets contain some of my niftier findings.  I took apart a watch to get the gears in the upper right. They aren’t as fun as all-metal gears, but plastic watch gears aren’t radioactive, unlike some of the radium dusted (it glows! In the dark!) ones from last century.  I like the transistors too, and the mirror tile.  I’ve been saving dead watch parts, so every collection of magnets I do might have a watch band buckle.

First step in creating these plates was to roll out wedged clay on the slab roller. You can see the texture of the canvas.  Second step was to stamp all over the slab using commercial rubber stamps.  I especially like the text background stamps.

So here’s my big update.

I’m planning to epublish my first novel. If it goes well, I’m going to follow it with the second and third, to make a nice, neat trilogy.

This is the plan, and it’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.  Bear in mind that I’m not a coward. I’ve backpacked by myself across Poland without a guidebook, broken bricks with my hand, and hitchhiked in Japan,  I’ve played with fire (literally), I’ve ridden poorly trained horses, I’ve crashed parties at which I was the only American, I’ve tried very hard in this life to (as Weird Al Yankovic puts it) “grab life by the lips and yank as hard as [I] can.”

Epublishing my novels still scares me.  These aren’t the only novels I’ve written, but they’re my first, and they’re near and dear to my heart.  I keep thinking about everything that can go wrong, and how hard it is to undertake such a big project alone. But I’m not really alone, am I? I have you guys.

Come on over to my other blog to read the rest.

These are more of my dichroic beetles, which I also fused before I realized that they would have blisters of trapped air in them.  Some of them have iridescent glass as a background, which does weird things to the glass on top of it. I’ll explain more in the next post.

At this point in the class, I decided to just go and buy some more clear glass. If you ever take a glass fusing class, be aware that you will likely use more clear glass than any other color, for capping dichro if nothing else.

I hadn’t yet tested the mica pigments yet, so the one on the left isn’t great quality. That’s not why it looks mutant though.  It looks mutant because someone suggested trying to draw on the glass with glue and using that to make a beetle.  I tried it.  It’s rather globular.  The elmer’s glue bottle doesn’t have the control I want for fine art.

The butterfly on the right was a different color. I wish I knew which one. As you can see, it retained some of the pinkish hue of the pearl x mica pigment powder.

Here’s what Jeremy and I did this weekend. We installed a tile floor in the master bath. When we first moved in, there was stained beige carpet in the bathroom that was so icky that I didn’t want to step on it. The walls had beige-and-blue print wallpaper, and the bathroom vanity was original to the (1964) house. It took several months to get the wallpaper off and repaint, but that’s as far as we got before summer plans got in the way. I’m very excited about our new tile, and about the prospect of having our own bathroom again.

We tore out the carpet in May, and underneath the carpet was a thin sheet of waterproofing plastic which had not quite been sufficient to keep the wood from getting wet on occasion. Under the plastic were thin vinyl tiles, which peeled up quite easily. There was some damage to the wood, but we figured that we’d make it worse by trying to rip out the rot, so we left it. We laid ‘hardibacker’ cement board on top of the plywood subfloor, using thinset and screws to hold it in place. We caulked around the tub (just to be sure) before laying more thinset, and then the tiles. It’s less than 60 square feet, but it took three hours because over half of the tiles had to be cut to fit.

Tomorrow I’ll remove the spacers and mix up the grout. I grouted our kitchen in the old house, which was maybe five times the size, and it only took a day, so I think this will go quickly too. Once the grout is cured (2-3 days, if I remember right) all we have to do is re-install the toilet and assemble the vanity and voila, a functioning bathroom.