Top of the Box - Top of the Weekend!

I did it! I have completed my jewelry box project by the end of the holiday weekend!
This is a photo of the box before grout. Notice that I left what is called "grout lines" - the curved lines in the piece. This is simply another way of directing the eye.


The next photo is the piece grouted and cleaned. I'm very pleased to have finished this project this weekend!! Off to class tomorrow!

The Top of the Box cont...

It's 11:30 pm again, and I've been working on this piece all day. I get an idea in my head and I can't let it go. I'm also under a time crunch because I start class on Tuesday and I have no idea how much homework I'll have. I won't be able to get this grouted before class starts, but grouting is the easy part. It's also a lot of fun!













Grouting is less thinking and more like playing in mud. It's like when you were a kid at the beach making sand castles. You get to mush your hands around in the grittiness and smear it all over working it down between the pieces of glass. It feels good, and it's also the moment of truth. It's when you know if your piece actually works or not.













The color you choose for the grout is extremely important! It can make or break your piece. You also have to make sure you mix enough grout if you mix a custom color. I use plain grout, un-tinted, and mix it with acrylic paint. I'm new at all of this, and what I know I've learned from my Californian friend - hopefully he won't be upset that I am giving away trade secrets...

Tick Tock

This is a pretty unusual piece. My 15-year-old daughter hates it. My 19-year-old daughter thinks it’s cool. It was fun to make! I took apart an old broken clock… well, I don’t think you can even call it a clock; it was the guts of a clock that was my uncle’s. He’s now in a nursing home and rambles about the Canadian Government (we live in the USA) and the nurses that work for the CIA. He seems happy in his world of secrecy and espionage… he gave me permission to take his clock before his stroke.

When I was pulling apart the old clock, trying to get all of the gears out, and looking for interesting parts I could use in my art, there was an old spring wound up tight. My mom was sitting there looking on. She said, “be careful that doesn’t spring and hit you.” It wasn’t two minutes later and that thing made a shrill “shriinggg” sound and sprung! It didn’t hit me, in fact it didn’t come all the way unsprung (if that’s a word), but it threw dust everywhere! The old clock was dusty, greasy, and covered with many year’s worth of time keeping collected in all its parts. A good soaking in WD40 cleaned everything up nicely.

I have two more clocks – one that was still ticking when my cousins brought it down from my uncle’s room even after he’s been in the nursing home for over a year – and another that is broken. I plan to use the parts for more jewelry, mosaics, and other artwork. I don’t know why my uncle had all of those clocks. My mom says my grandfather would be happy I’m using them. He used to repair clocks. I never met my grandfather, but I’ve always had a fascination for clocks and clock parts… I wonder if it’s genetic?

My Little Bumpy Journey

Okay, final exam aside (literally), I finished my problem piece (pictured above). It may be a little weird to critique my own artwork… which I am selling… which I have a link to this blog on my store site… but maybe not. I mean, that’s actually the point of this blog – to map out my journey into the art world, or back into the art world. I used to be an art student. First all kinds of art in high school, then interior design and architectural drawing in college until I gave up on that idea because those people are too cutthroat for me. I then moved on to the idea of becoming a high school art teacher, but met my ex-husband and got married and had kids instead. Notice the “ex” in front of the word husband. He wasn’t into art at all… or anything I was into for that matter. After the divorce, I went back to school and ended up with a Bachelor of Science in Business Management, and now I am half way to my Masters in Public Administration… if I finish my final exam that is.

I digress. The question at hand is, how weird is the band of cobalt blue mirror and grout at the bottom of this jar? I thought I liked it until I grouted it. I thought it was the grout color I didn’t like, but I’ve decided the color is fine. The lid of the jar is quite nice actually. I’m rather proud of the beadwork. It’s that darn band around the bottom that has me troubled. However, I have posted it “For Sale” on Etsy. Someone might just find it quite interesting and pluck it off my site.

Here We Go Again...

Well, I made it through the project with the falling pieces, and now I have a project I simply am not sure I like. I started out liking it. I started out quite impressed with myself and my wonderful gift for design, eye for color, and good fortune at being born with both. Until I grouted with a gawd awful color and the design idea I had may have turned out to be a huge mistake. Ugh. And to make things worse, while I was mixing the grout, that little voice in my head - you know the one - was whispering, "this is a bad color." But, the other voice in my head, my mom's voice, was whispering, "you've started mixing it, you can't waste it, you have to use it now." Sigh.

Honestly. It was about two tablespoons of grout. I could have thrown it out and no trees would have died, no animals would have suffered, no children would have starved, and I would have bought myself some time to rethink things. Now I have to work with what I have and try to salvage the situation. ...I know, I know... I said it myself, this could turn out to be a great piece because of my mistake! Right.

Falling off the Edges

You must understand, since I am new to mosaics, my panic when I began to grout a piece I had been working on for a week and my tiny pieces of glass started falling off the edges. All of the care I had taken nipping those tiny little gems and painstakingly gluing them down flashed before my eyes. I immediately called my dear friend who had gotten me hooked on this hobby, but was greeted with his voicemail instead of the reassurance I craved.

Having no idea what to do next, I started scraping the grout out of the spaces from where the pieces had fallen and frantically started gluing them back in. Wet grout, wet glue, a pounding heart, and my black cat looking on. My message to my friend in California had sounded something like, “I’M GROUTING AND PIECES ARE FALLING OUT AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO SO CALL ME BACK!” In what I’m sure was a shaky, panicked, somewhat screechy voice.

Art can definitely be an accident. Sometimes our best work happens because we make a mistake. Like lens flair in a photo, an improperly mixed paint color that turns out to be the perfect shade, or a mistake that has to be worked in or around and ends up being a focal point. Life works out that way sometimes too. We screw something up, or something screws us up, and we have to work with it.

I finally was able to talk to my friend who reassured me that my piece would be fine. I simply had to wait for the grout to dry, glue in all of my pieces of glass, and regrout. He also said I need better glue! DON’T SKIMP ON GLUE! Was the main message here.

Do you hear that? Don’t skimp on the glue.