thinned newfragile yellows (e.e.cummings)

The material: Scrap stained glass pieces
The source: The stained glass....store?
The story: Doggies, I still live in an I Can't Paint These Walls world. In an attempt to get around that, I have been trying to splice color into odd spots all around. This stove-side window in my kitchen overlooks things like gravel, the Broadstreet Market (when you careen your neck), and a Honda (always). I am against being able to see two out of three of those things, but I am also insistent on a house full of light through its windows. Stained glass exists for this very reason, and so one evening, my favoriteprofessorandnowdearfriend Helen Walker and I held a thousand squares of color to the light to find our favorites. I picked two to fit my kitchen window in colors that would pick up the table, the cups, and NOT the gravel/Honda. These days, I am obsessed with the yellow-to-green-to-brown spectrum. Be prepared for that when you come visit. The house is smashedfull with it.













The How To Do It:
1. Spend years making jewelry, and you will have acquired a wealth of very thin-gauged wire by the time you want to do this project.
2. Wrap wire four or five times around the center of the glass pane, and then back onto itself toward the top to get rid of dastardly stray wire ends.
3. Form a hoop of wire at the top out of the excess.
4. Make the hoop longer for the second pane of glass to allow for staggered hanging.
5. Use any old fixture you want to hang the panes from. I used a standard wall hook that I found rolling around in the utensil drawer.
The cost:$6 (scrap pane of glass) + $6 (scrap pane of glass) + $0 (wire from forever ago) +0 (wall hook, undoubtedly once belonging to my roommate) = $12.













And now welcome to a segment we call This Person Has Surpassed Me, in which I catch wind of someone doing excellent work and would like to tell you about them. Today's guest is Matthew Murray. His jam is to photograph abandoned structures to both document their downfall and dignify their beauty, specializing in asylums and churches. One thing in particular that I appreciate about his pieces is how carefully and eye-wrinklingly titled they are. Matt's work is excellent and has inspired me to enter dangerous buildings to photograph them. He can be blamed for my death.

i had nothing better to do than listen. i mean this seriously. (mary oliver)

the items: a recovered window shade; a household's collection of earrings

the source: the decrepit basement of the sycamore house; the wealth of three girls

the story: a straightforward tale. i saw the screen beneath stacks of dust, and i saw my earrings awry on my dresser, clinging like crabs in a bucket to each other. so i put them together like slant rhyme. it helps me adorn my ears, and having handsome ears helps me listen.

the price: $0 (window shade) + $Years of Collected Pairs of Earrings = $Sorta 0

and now, welcome to a segment we call This Person Has Surpassed Me in which i catch wind of someone doing excellent work, and i want to tell you about them.

today's guest is justin arawjo, one of my very favorite local artists AND people. his screenprint designs are at once bizarre and familiar, and his style is recognizable from across the room. here is my favorite design of his.

we'll be all right. we have our looks. (the national)

welcome to the second project.

the items: oversized window; pile of ties
the sources: green street; a lady from my church's husband's closet
the story: i'm the sort of person that people unload their Unwanted Things on, easily my favorite trait about myself. sometimes, the end goal is way ambiguous (for example, i have a stack of x-rays and a huge bag of corks, and every idea i've tried to use them for has bombed. TELL ME YOUR IDEAS), but sometimes they hang around my studio for about a minute until i decide how to use them. this time, it was the latter. lynn, my friend and aforementioned church lady, gave me a pile of her husband's ties from the middle of the century To Do With What I Would. i also had an oversized window like those mentioned in previous blog posts.



the process was simple. i cut the ties to size, arranged them according to optimal clever pattern sequencing, and nailed them to the frame. (keep in mind: when you are using old windows, there is often a lot of crumbling paint and grout to deal with. i had to sweep a ton after this project.)



when you put that crap together and hang it in your art studio, it looks like this:



(i only used about 2/3 of each tie for this project, and my plans are to make a smaller scale version of it to give back to lynn. DON'T TELL.)

the cost: $0 (oversized window found on green street) + $0 (ties from lynn's husband's closet) = $0.