I never thought I'd enjoy engraving glass so much (here and here), and I was unreasonably upset when I couldn't find anywhere in the house the yogurt jars I knew I'd carefully saved! It turned out that they'd been taken to the recycling bin during one of Rebecca's long hospital stays, when I'd been gone for several weeks.
So for the past couple of months now I've been saving up empty jars, building a nice supply of glass for my next engraving craving. It's surprising how long it takes to collect jars right at the end of summer, when the shelves are crammed with preserved foods. But honey, olive paste and French mustard come in jars, and I've made sure all my family members have had their fair share of them ... in the interests of glass engraving, naturally!
This weekend I set up my outdoor atelier, and did some impromptu engraving while the weather was nice. I'd originally planned to do some research on engraved designs, and draw my favorites on strips of black paper to put inside the glass, to guide my engraving. But I never got round to that. So I just sat outdoors, my Dremel tool in my right hand, a jar in my left, a hospital mask over my face (one of the masks left over from Rebecca's Intensive Care stay - how much better it felt to wear them while crafting!), just looking at the natural shapes all around me. Then I started engraving.
The designs are nothing special, I'll admit, but working without a pattern was really interesting - it forced me to use my eyes and my memory a lot more, and to dig deep into my own creativity. In fact, recently I've started to wonder whether the many tutorials available all over the Internet don't in some cases actually hamper individual creativity a little. Of course, a truly original idea only comes to me rarely - more often than not I've seen something somewhere that has inspired me. I may even look at some patterns and tutorials. But sooner or later, something unruly inside me kicks in, steering me away from the original plan and getting me to make my own way by trial and error. Sometimes the results aren't so great, while others I'm happy with what I've done. But good or bad, every time I've had to come up with my own creative solutions and ideas, and I've learned something. Ultimately, I believe, creativity feeds creativity.
And so as I sat there outdoors with no patterns, I just looked around and saw bees buzzing on the loquat tree, the drying hydrangeas and blossoming chrysanthemum and the yellowing vineyard, and ... I just switched on the Dremel tool and started engraving, with all these images floating in my mind.
