Written on June 25, 2010 by Katie
Toby-dog and I go to the beach. The tide is way out. The sea is a deep blue. The curl and collapse of the waves is a glittering wall of diamond and sea glass.
Toby sniffs, interested, at piles of plastic rubbish, then pees on them decisively.
We’re both fascinated by the hundreds of shells that encrust an old log washed up high on the shore. The shells are indigo-purple and polished to a shine, each one tied to the log by its own individual ribbon of brown seaweed. They’re so decorative, they could’ve come straight from the Accessorize window display. I run my hand over them, against the grain, and they tinkle like pistachio shells.
Up at the base of the dunes, Toby finds dead birds to roll in. Further along, we find a single dead puffin. Its beak is stunningly pretty, an etsy-esque confection. It lies marooned in a display case of rotting flesh, feather, sinew and bone.
Written on June 17, 2010 by Katie
The work mobile peep-peeps:
‘Watch yourself today, it could go either way,’ it tells me.
I stare at the black letters, cut out hard and sharp against the white glow of the screen.
I crumple.
My positivity is so fragile, my resilience so low. I may be fine, but it’s a kind of fine that shatters at the faintest ...
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Written on June 9, 2010 by Katie
Late at night, when most people sleep, and the fields outside are soft with dew and summer half-light, I log-in to WordPress.
Pixel lizards scuttle across glass. A frogspawn avatar gloops across multiple websites as I comment here and comment there. Fish flit and drift as the gallery slideshow fades in and out. A dark waterfall ...
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Written on June 5, 2010 by Katie
Forest demons and brutal murder: they happen.
It's March. I'm out walking at Braehour Forestry, trying to walk out the tension, the out-of-all-proportion emotional responses to relatively minor work issues; trying to exercise my way out of the back ache, the stiffness in my neck, ...
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Written on June 1, 2010 by Katie
Been busy? Distracted somewhat? Focused on other things?
Oh, sorry. It's not you who's been missing, it's us.
I check into our stats, and see you've been popping in regularly over the past couple months to see what we've been up to. Thanks, appreciated. You may be a nameless faceless internet provider statistic, dropping in from some ...
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Written on April 8, 2010 by Moi
I like doing Stained Glass that incorporates hundreds of pieces. I like the detail. I reckon Sandblasting will allow scope for a lot more detail.
(Kiln work and painting will also allow me to play with a lot more detail, though I've not yet ...
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Written on March 21, 2010 by Moi
The Next Thing is a little experiment with poppy seed heads.
I'm thinking two primary colours: red (on clear), blue (on clear), and shades thereof to white. And we'll definitely have some deepest darkest purple thrown in there ...
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Written on March 17, 2010 by Moi
Immediately after Algebraic Multigrid was finished, the brain was fizzing with The Next Thing...
... I got myself a sandblaster this year.
Its arrival into the Glass House did not go as smoothly as anticipated. It has needed not so much fine tuning ...
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Written on March 14, 2010 by Moi
This is the most recent major project.
The design came from a print-out of an example of my husband Ron's scientific work. It had been on his wall for a long time, and I'd always liked it.
It's ...
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Written on February 28, 2010 by Katie
28th February 2010, not a leap year, but the year we made the leap. Launching A Glass Stramash may be unheralded by all but us, but it is, nevertheless, an important day.
What's a 'stramash' and what's glass got to do with it? Any Scot reading this will know the term well enough, for anyone else ...
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