I've been mesmerized by glass for years. The colors. The shapes into which it is formed. The way light reflects from its surface. Its cool, smooth, shiny texture when touched.
Several years ago, two colleagues and I sat in a restaurant trying to find a metaphor to pull together a presentation we were planning for a conference. We had struggled, and brainstormed, were hungry, and near frustration, when one of us leaned back, and looking upward, caught a glimpse of a stained glass window in the ceiling above us. Suddenly, we had our metaphor and our inspiration--it was glass, wonderful glass, in its many forms!*Since then, I've collected glass bottles in various colors, taken photographs of glass, and designed jewelry with glass beads. What a beautiful, fragile (yet strong) piece of art glass can be!
Below are just a few of the glass bottles and other items I've collected, paired with glass bead jewelry of similar shades.
The pale green/blue of ocean water
The "Pink Stuff"
Dark Blue--My Favorite
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To create glass, you must heat a mixture of raw materials to such an extreme that their molecular bonds break and then quickly cool the newly created substance in order to lock the atoms into a random state before they can form into a perfect crystal arrangement. In other words, glass, the very substance that makes our high-speed digital networks possible through fiber optics, is a type of frozen chaos. The potential for glass, like the potential of digital resources, is limited only by our imaginations....
Internet Librarian 2005, "Session D106 — Glassworks: The Public Library as the Center of a Digital World"
--This page dedicated to my friends and former colleagues, E.R. and T.R.
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For more jewelry designed with glass beads, visit Sharyl's Jewelry.
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