Hearts of Glass, Booth #40 at the Art in the City Festival

We're having a lovely sunny weekend at the Art in the City handmade show in beautiful downtown Confederation Park!

Saturday August 27 10am – 6pm 2011
Sunday August 28 10am – 4pm 2011

Happy Pride Weekend everyone! Huge respect and appreciation to our elders who were involved in human rights activism in the 60s, 70s and 80s. I just watched an amazing documentary on the story of the struggle from decriminalization in Canada in '69 to the addition of sexual orientation to the Human Rights Code in Ontario in 1987, thereby ending the era of needing to hide your love in order to keep your job. Thank you!!!

Also, huge thank you to our friend Jill who brought over her truck and helped us set up on Friday morning! :)

A Flight of Dragonflies!

Despite the warm humid weather, I took advantage of this rare, unbooked weekend to gear up and bust out the borosilicate glass that has been in storage since we packed up our Winnipeg studio last May! As you may remember from my last post, my mission was dragonflies. The goal this round was to make smaller, more wearable pendants while retaining all the detail and vitality of the older stickpin style.

I'm really happy with my first batch! This "flight" has a lot of diversity because I was experimenting with a variety of proportions and approaches, trying to find the best balance between durability and visual delicacy. The scale is around 1.5", so they are still "life sized", but more like the smaller species rather than the larger ones!

I just read about the smallest species of dragonfly. They are only 3/4" long! I think that's about as tiny as I can make one in glass. I made one nearly that tiny once but I didn't realize there were species that small. The "smallest dragonfly" title is a tie between the Elfin Skimmer (Nannothemis bella) of centre North America and the Scarlet Dwarf (Nannophya pygmaea) of Malaysia. I continue to be delighted by the ridiculously poetic common names of dragonflies!