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The Nutmeg Designs YouTube Channel: Mosaics and Stained Glass in Motion

In our partnership of marriage and craft, it is good that one of us has some geek talent, and that Stratoz puts it to such good use.  Over Memorial Day weekend he took on iMovie and made 4 videos about our art, and created the Nutmeg Designs YouTube Channel.  I admire Stratoz’s ability to learn by doing, to fully immerse himself in the process.  He’s already thinking in video, imagining what would be brought to life with motion, sound, and jazz.  My friend the “Grout Monster“, Joanne Leva, came over for a grout session, and here are the results of Stratoz’s handiwork(as well as Joanne’s and my hands!)

The latest Nutmeg Designs Production is a cool stop-motion-like chronicle of one of Stratoz’s mosaics. Yes, he mosaics. He is multi-talented! At first, I felt a twinge of protectiveness of my identity as the Mosaic Artist, but it’s fascinating to watch people at craft shows, as they hone in on the ones he’s made, and say that they are definitely made by someone else. His style is all his own, and I love how they incarnate his doodling designs. I do get covetous of his ease of grouting, with the sleek surfaces and larger pieces! Check out his Kurt Elling Sings Joe Jackson as a Mandala Comes into Being:

A Sand and Sea Mosaic Mandala: Beach Colors and Exploring New Shores

I love it when someone challenges me to play with new colors!  A customer, who used to live in Pennsylvania, but now lives in Florida, described how her PA colors seemed too dark for her light filled, spacious rooms in her new home.  She is drawn to beach colors, aqua for the sea, sandy browns, white for the clouds.  I grew up in Edmonton, AB, Canada, which is even farther from the beach than PA ever is.  In the prairie province, the beach was not something I referred to, or understood as a concept.  Yes, I lived in Oregon for awhile, but that’s not the beach, that’s the coast, dramatic, rocky, rainy.

Sand and Sea Mosaic Mandala

I had this piece of abalone shell I’d found at a bead shop, and which seemed to beautiful in and of itself to break, and which immediately became the focal point of the wave in this mosaic mandala.  The shell spirals into aqua gold smalti, with its metallic glow and then glass tile, and stained glass in shades of blue, aqua and seafoam green, and ending with silver smalti for a bit of white foam.  Light colored grout added a sandy quality to the swirl of mother of pearl tile, iridized glass tile and stained glass.  This was invigorating fun to deliberately go light.

What sparks your creativity?

 

Commission your new color.

The Universe of Cosmos Glass Tile: Speckled Loveliness

Red Blanket Flower Mandala by Margaret Almon with a Center of Cosmos Glass Tile.
Red Blanket Flower Mandala by Margaret Almon with a Center of Cosmos Glass Tile.

New materials are gifts to my creative spirit, and Cosmos glass tiles have a universe of possibility.  Said to made of 80% recycled black glass, with a metallic iridescence flashed onto the surface, looking like constellations of tiny stars.

Even better, in my love of the imperfect, the seconds, broken or oddly, are called “Meteorites” as if they burned through earth’s atmosphere!  The center of this Red Blanket Flower Mandala begins in coppery orange Cosmos.

The iridescence reminds me of when I looked longingly at the eyeshadows on the drugstore cosmetic shelves.  After high school, my eye shadow use dropped drastically, but I still love looking at the compacts of shimmering colors.  My attraction to adornment has moved to more permanent kinds.

Cosmos in Gold.
Cross by Margaret Almon Using Cosmos in Gold.

 

 

Film Noir Heart by Margaret Almon with Silver Cosmos Tile.
Film Noir Heart by Margaret Almon with Silver Cosmos Tile.

Y is For Youghiogheny Glass

47 166/365 This is not my studio floor
Youghiogheny Glass Factory Parking Lot. Photo by Wayne Stratz.

Stratoz took a trip to visit a friend in Cleveland, and stopped at the Youghiogheny Glass Factory in Connellsville, PA,  on his way back.  He was greeted by this really cool parking lot of glass scraps!  He bought several sheets to bring home, and we’ve been enjoying the rich variegated colors and the dimension and beauty they bring to Stratoz’ stained glass and my mosaics.

47 169/365 Up close with Youghiogheny Glass
Up close with Youghiogheny Glass. Photo by Wayne Stratz.

 

Welcome Sign Mosaic in Warm Tones
Welcome Sign Mosaic in Warm Tones by Nutmeg Designs

 

47 215/365 went home with a friend
Blue Green Starflower by Wayne Stratz.

We are proud that Youghiogheny glass is from Pennsylvania!

V is For Van Gogh Glass

Radial Cross in Blue and Maroon
Radial Cross in Blue and Maroon by Margaret Almon.

Van Gogh Glass is a mystery that I enjoy using in my work.  It is made in the US, of glue chip glass(which has the lovely feathery patterning amazingly caused by special glue as it dries on the glass), painted with metallic automobile-type paint and then with a black coating.  It has a three dimensional effect, as if you are looking into the depths of the glass.  All this information comes from snippets from sellers of the glass, but no one actually claims the title of the manufacturer of this glass.  Definitely a mystery, but a beautiful one.

 

Film Noir Starburst Mandala by Margaret Almon

Antique Gold and Mother of Pearl Frame

 

Another Favorite V:  Vitrium Glass Tile

T is For Tesserae, Tesseract and Tessering

Tesserae Drawer number 2

One of the pleasures of making mosaics is the word “tessera” which comes from the Latin for “four” and means something four-sided, square like a game piece or a tile.  Mosaics originally were made with  square chunks of marble, but the word tessera has generalized to mean any material used in a mosaic, whatever the shape or substance.  Tesserae is the plural, and the photo above is of one drawer of what I refer to as my “tower of tesserae.”

This word may sound familiar to those of you who are fans of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which was one of my favorite books as a girl.  The main character is named Margaret(although she goes by Meg), which endeared me to the book, and she and several other characters travel through space with the help of tesseracts, which wrinkle up time, and make long distances much shorter to leap.

In the math world, a tesseract is a 3D representation of a 4D cube, which is hard for me to visualize, but I came across a really cool digital Tesseracti, for your enjoyment:

Tesseracti

M is for Millefiori

M is for millefiori, meaning “a thousand flowers” in Italian.  These little beads never fail to delight with their flowers, cogs, bullseyes and geometrics.  Watch the video below to see the process of molding the glass canes, and the amazing stretching they go through, before being sliced into the pieces that I use in my mosaics.   I just finished these fun brooches, with my latest order of new millefiori.

Mosaic Millefiori Brooches by Margaret Almon.
Mosaic Millefiori Brooches by Margaret Almon.

Here’s a video of the process of pulling the canes of glass to make millefiori.

 

Related:

Murano Millefiori

I is for Iridized Glass

yellow sunflower mandala: a glass mosaic by Margaret Almon
yellow sunflower mandala: a glass mosaic by Margaret Almon

 

I is for iridized glass, and its shimmering rainbow effect.  A thin metallic layer is bonded to the glass when a metallic salt solution is applied and then heated.  Dichroic glass, which means “two color” is sometimes confused with iridized glass, but it is a coating that allows the glass to toggle back and forth between only 2 colors. The pale yellow glass, second row from the outer edge in this mandala, is iridized, and you can see the subtle purplish sheen of the rainbow coloration.  Tiffany patented a version of iridescent glass called “Favrile” which was applied to his blown glass artworks. Here is an excerpt from Mark Doty’s apt poem, titled Favrile:

Glassmakers,
at century’s end,
compounded metallic lusters

 

in reference
to natural sheens (dragonfly
and beetle wings,

 

marbled light on kerosene)
and invented names
as coolly lustrous

 

as their products’
scarab-gleam: Quetzal,
Aurene, Favrile.

 

Suggesting,
respectively, the glaze
of feathers,

 

that sun-shot fog
of which halos
are composed. . .

 

G is for Gold Smalti

Gold Sunflower Mandala for Dr. Ed and his family by Margaret Almon.
Gold Sunflower Mandala for Dr. Ed and his family by Margaret Almon.

G is for gold smalti, luscious, glowing, gold.  As smalti from Orsoni is described at mosaicsmalti.com,

“. . .it is real 24-carat gold. It has to be the purest gold to withstand a firing and beating process that obtains the incredible results. With just one cubic centimeter of gold, more than six square meters of beaten gold may be produced in a layer so fine that it is scarcely perceptible to the human eye. The gold leaf is then sandwiched between a transparent glass base and a fine, hand-blown glass that protects the surface. The three elements, heated once again, are welded into a single slab that is free of cracks even in the most minute fragments.”

I was smitten with gold smalti from the moment I received a few precious pieces in a grab bag of miscellaneous smalti.  It’s usually sold by the ounce or by the piece, and it’s fortunate that a little goes a long way.  This is what makes Byzantine Churches glow.  This is what grabs the light and gives it back to you with incredible depth and intense color.

I made this mandala almost entirely from gold smalti, as a gift for Dr. Ed Schillinger and his family, when he was dealing with pancreatic cancer.  He was a kind man, and in his memory Stratoz makes “Dr. Ed Mandalas” with a portion of the proceeds going to Pancreatic Cancer Action Network(PANCAN).  Another G word is Give, and I encourage you to contribute toward pancreatic cancer research.

 

Over at Stratoz:  Shockingly, G is for Glass