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.

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 tap.

I must never make decisions about my workload, job, or life when I’m ‘fine.’

My state of fine is deceptive.

Fragility is a more accurate compass.

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 roars across the top of our home page.  Our website, our online existence, is alive with the rustlings and splashes of aquatic and amphibious creatures.

I am swept away on the current.   My fingertips hop-scotch across the keys, tappety tap, tappety tap, tappety tappety tappety tap.  The fan of the laptop burrs.  And behind it all, there’s the barely perceptible whirl of millions of online voices.

This is the sound of the internet:  percussion and hum.

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, the soaring blood pressure spikes at even a passing mention of certain work projects.

The day is damp.  The sky is dark grey, and sleety rain sputters on and off.  Frogspawn clots the ditches.  A stream of dark water mutters down into the black culverts that pass beneath the track, then swirls swiftly out the other side and away between the trees.  I am stuck in the misery of Work Stress.  I don’t know how to get away from it.  I keep walking, if I walk far enough, maybe I’ll leave it behind…  And if that doesn’t work, maybe I’ll have to batter it over the head with a blunt object and bury it deep in the woods, where no cliché of a dysfunctional urban detective could ever find it.  Who knows, maybe it will come to that.

I veer off the track and clamber up onto the bank to take a closer look at the tree trunks gnawed by starving deer during this year’s unusually harsh winter.  I investigate fallen fir trees and the dens their roots make.  One looks just like a forest demon.  It’s only because I am an adult, and this is not a Hollywood fantasy, that it doesn’t blink into life and say something startling to me.

The almost-sighting of a forest demon, even a potentially malevolent one, is a good sign.  Any spark of imagination is always a good sign.

A mile or so further on, and I’ve managed to completely shift my head away from the broken-record ruminations of work.  I drift off into ideas for our blog.  I begin to daydream the glittering heights of internet-business success.

In a small childish corner of my mind, other daydreams continue:  make-believe stories of talking forest demons and palatial dens in the woods.  I don’t know yet if these stories are benign or evil, but they simmer away below my grown-up façade.

By the time I get back to the car, there is no longer any need to commit an act of murder, or to hide any unlucky corpse in the forestry plantation.  I’m home clear for the day.  Bring on the next working day.  Bring on another blog post.

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 random ball-park area of the globe (Hi Moscow!  Hi Estonia!), based probably on a Google search that didn’t bring you quite what you were after…  But it’s good to see you came by anyway.  Shame we were out.

Where’ve we been?  Well, we’ve not been far, geographically.  You guys are the exotic international contingent (Hi Vancouver!  Hi Rio!  Hi, uh, East Lothian!).  We’ve stayed put, pretty much, save a jaunt to sunny D one long weekend… (that D can be Dundee, or Durness, depending on your preferences for places beginning with D in Scotland).

But, yeah, I managed to wander off the blogging track, getting horribly quagmired into overworking the Day Job.  I love the Day Job, but over-work for months at a time is never a good thing.

Moi has been getting lost in lizard-land, absorbed in designing and creating glass panels crawling with all manner of lizards, geckos and newts…   Pictures coming soon, probably.

We’ve come to the conclusion that we’ve really got to crack this photography thing – why spend hours crafting fantastic pieces of art, only to wop up some shoddy photos into our gallery?  Nonsense.  So that’s an upcoming project, for a rainy Sunday afternoon perhaps (should be plenty of them, summer in the Far North, not usually a sun-lovers dream…).

So tune in next time, for more pictures of fab stuff, hopefully.  (And if this wasn’t quite what you were looking for, good luck with your Google searches…  There are good tiger images elsewhere, I’m sure).

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 had the chance to get into much of that.  Watch this space).

Also, sandblasting involves a whole different way of thinking:

• It’s about a design, and its mirror image.
• It’s about colour, and negative colour.
• It’s about where the sand will blast, and how light or deep the blast will cut.
• It’s also about which parts of the design will stay pristine.

It’s a challenge to think in these new ways, but it’s good.  It’s no good waking in the wee small hours, to remember the rubbish stuff that happened in the daily grind.  But it’s wonderful waking in the night and turning to thoughts associated with negative colour…

“If that goldfish floats over this goldfish, how will the space around the third goldfish affect the borders around the fourth fish…?”

Who cares what happened in the daily grind when golden fish flit and glide around in the dark spaces… Until they, like me, sink into the depths zzz…

Image by k_millo

Poppy Seed Heads (work in progress)

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 too.

The idea is ready to do.  The drawing is done.  Glass Eye has rendered its’ size and colour.  The thinking process has guessed at the order of colour.

All that awaits, is a day off  Work.

Immediately after Algebraic Multigrid was finished, the brain was fizzing with The Next Thing…

Sandblasted Pendant

… 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 as a major tuning to render it less of an industrial blast-cleaner and more like the precision instrument it was supposed to be, capable of carving miniature works of… well, why not say it… art.

Since finally getting it into shape, I’ve only had the one chance to use it properly: to create a small, lop-sided, drop-shaped piece, using blue on clear and red on clear flashed glass.

I was pleased with the result (in that it wasn’t a disaster):

Algebraic Multigrid (in progress)

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 a pleasing and complex design of incomprehensible mathematics.

It occurred to me that this could make quite a nice birthday present for Ron.  Plus, if scaled to fit his study window, then we could finally replace the grotty net curtain that separates the outside world from the lofty realms of scientific endeavour on the inside.

The Process

I got my hands on the design without him knowing.  Using the Glass Eye 2000 Stained Glass software, it was relatively easy to trace the design, size it, play with colour, then print out a scaled ‘cartoon.’

Having, at the moment, a fairly well stocked shelf of sheet glass, I’d enough of the right colours to dive straight in.  Ron was promptly banned from accessing the Glass House.

It has straight lines everywhere (except round the circular globs, obviously) and so it was quick and easy to cut.  Unusually quick, for me, as I’ve spent the past 10 years working mainly with curves which makes progress so much slower.  The most difficult bit of decision-making I faced was what to use for the globs – flat glass or nuggets?  Decisions decisions.  Unexpectedly, I found that the nuggets came in two sizes – 13mm and 17mm – which fitted the cartoon perfectly.

Flipping it was scary.  The final construction meant that the panel was made up of a very heavy and rigid ‘doughnut’ encased within four relatively weak and flimsy border pieces.  The ‘whoops factor’ came at the end of the soldering stage, after it had been washed.  To lift the panel, I gripped the two uppermost edge pieces.  All of a sudden, mid-lift, one large piece slid neatly out of its soldering seams (unsurprisingly, really).  The whole panel coud so easily have slipped and dashed on the concrete floor.  It didn’t.  Steep learning curve…

The Algebraic Multigrid is now fixed in a zinc frame.  It lies horizontal, and safe, until it can be even more securely fixed into a hardwood frame within the window space.

Ron got it for his birthday last weekend – and since has had his access to the Glass House restored.

All’s well that ends well.

Algebraic Multigrid (complete)

Vital Statistics

Dimensions = 30 inch square

Number of pieces = 546

Hours of cutting & grinding = 64½

Hours of soldering = 5 ¼

Hours of messing about generally = 75

Feet of copperfoil = 190

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 out there in the rest of the world, a stramash is a disturbance, a fury, a clamour, a crash.  It’s a good Scots word, and sums up the kind of wild energy that breaking inspiration, colours and ideas can unleash.  Plus, it sounds pretty good alongside ‘glass,’ which makes all the difference.

So that’s us, and that’s how we’re defining ourselves, at least to start out with.  Bring on the next installment…