Day 3 with Verdiano and Sophie...

I'll start this post off with the photos... There are three - one of the sketch for the mosaic, one of my table at the end of the day and a close-up of the mosaic.

I'm thinking its title is Facing (maybe Finding, or Hunting) the Mystery... or something like that.

I had the option to go on a tour of mosaics in Chicago, but I was on a roll with cutting tesserae, so I stayed behind and cut a lot of stone. I had enough glass cut so I just focused on the marble. You get in a rhythm and it works well - the hammer strikes the stone perfectly and the cut happens where you want it - then you get cocky and you either get your thumb with the hammer (and the hammer is sharp) or you hit the hardie with the hammer (*shame*) or your cuts go all wonky and you cannot get the pieces you want no matter what. So the moral of the story is:

STAY HUMBLE and your cuts will satisfy you (and Verdiano too!)...

Verdiano and Sophie really seem to like my mosaic at this point. I feel pretty good about the mosaic and pretty damn good about them liking it. Karen said "Wow." too. It's great to learn from people who show you where you're going good and where you could change things up and get better results. I think we'll be doing a critique on Sunday and that will be great too. I love critiques - love talking about everyone's work, together, looking for the strengths in a piece and offering suggestions for making the next work even stronger.

It's great to be working on a piece that is so different. I love the Blenko glass. So I'll be getting some of that when I get the down-payment on the next mosaic (a week from today). I've learned about some great new tools and some of them will be going home with me and others will come later (we're pulling together a list of people interested in the tools from overseas [France? Italy?] so that we can buy en masse and save). And I'm definitely getting a bunch of marble.