Oh go on then...

As I still haven't managed to motivate myself back in the workshop since returning from hols (and ouch, my sinuses, my sinuses! I can't bend over my workbench without my eyes feeling like they are going to pop out of my head) here's a few snaps...

I was very excited by this Greek Ice Cream van...



We were all a bit scared by this tree though...


Rhodes City...




Obligatory donkey shot...



OK, so that's 2 Greek salads, a portion of chips and lashings and lashings of tzatziki please. And 2 very cold beers...


Nelly's pebble mosaic lolly stick windmill.


And here she is, rocking the Little House on the Prairie look, in the nicest cafe in the world...


Some gates I liked very much. Our house would be so much better with these attached...


I intend to get some work done tonight...really, I do...

Back

Yes, I'm back, with the smell of tzatziki still fresh in my mind and a sinus condition that is making it very difficult to concentrate on anything, and impossible to bend over to do any chores (like unpacking).

But I do have pictures to show you. Not holiday ones, I'm sure you have far better things to do with your time. But ones of the front door I fitted before I went away.

The design is Victorian Geometric, and the glass used is Dynasty Restoration Cathedral (which is made in China but is an excellent reproduction of original Victorian domestic glass in beautifully muted colours). For the borders, I used handmade Polish antique red and clear Muranese (which has a very sweet flower pattern impressed on the glass and is also traditional for the period).

The property is a building site at the moment, and it looks like this. You can see what an amazingly cool and kinda-Scooby-Doo-spooky-Victorian house it is underneath all that scaffolding though.


The front door looked like this.


Halfway through fitting.


Ta-daah.



Just a quick word of advice. If you ever find yourself driving along with 7 stained glass panels in the back of your car, always check the passenger door pocket for a rogue heavy mallet which your husband had stashed there and not told you about. Because you might find that when you go round a mini-roundabout, the said mallet will come flying out of the door pocket and land on top of your stained glass panels causing all kinds of unpleasant damage which you will have to spend an entire afternoon rectifying. Sigh.

Finishing up and heading off...

My workshop is literally bursting at the seams with the huge pile of finished windows waiting to be fitted. I think there's about 17 panels in there all in all - barely room for myself now! I'm just trying to arrange fitting half of them tomorrow, then once that's out the way, I'm in holiday mode. This weekend I'm up to London (for a hen night - but a very tasteful one - no L plates of bridal veils) then on Wednesday we are off to Rhodes for a week (first family holiday since, erm, er, ever!)

So this is constantly plyaing in my head at the moment!


On a completely unrelated subject, I'm very excited about this. I'm a big fan of the kooky crazy quirky world of Sarah Neuburger so I'm really delighted about her collaboration with Chronicle Books to create these little funsters:




Available now from you know where...

New Arrival

*Harumph. As usual, the red glass has come out looking decidedly blurry on the blog when it's perfectly fine in the picture really...you'll have to see it in the shop to believe me!

This is what's been cooking in the workshop over the last few days (along with the rest of the jobs that I can't seem to get to the end of). I made it for my friend who has just had her third baby...I figured that she might not get the same amount of attention that she did for her first and second - and surely you're going to need all the fuss you can get when you're on number three! So also in the box went a large bar of chocolate, Berrocca, sachets of Calpol, Infacol, Kamillosan...

I was so pleased with the way it turned out, and how much fun it was to make - so simple, just three pieces of glass (although one of them is a most troublesome shape to cut) and 4 solder joints. There might be a bit of Dick Bruna influence in there, alongside the whole 1950s circus vibe...


I even enjoyed wrapping it up...in fact I think I like sending parcels almost as much as I like receiving them! Check out that dinky little elephant gift tag I made from some of Nelly's Hama Beads (which I am becoming seriously addicted to - and I'm not the only one).


Anyhoo, to cut a long story short, I've also just listed it in the shop, as a personalised made-to-order thingummyjig.

Hope you all have fun weekends!