More Octo Progress

Hey everyone! This weekend I made some good progress on the stained glass octopus I'm making. I ended up not working on it last weekend, because last weekend was sunny. In Scotland.I know, shocker! Thing is, when it's sunny out on a weekend in Scotland, it's kind of The Law that you have to do something fun outdoors. Because the next sunny weekend might come....never.

So, on both Saturday and Sunday last week, we took the boat out on Loch Lomond. Sunday we had a picnic on Inchconnachan Island (no wallabies sighted, but we did see some wallaby poo on the beach where we picnicked. We were able to positively identify said poo after we got home. Go ahead and Google "wallaby droppings," and you'll be presented with lots of images of the real article. God bless the Internet!)

Here's a view of one of the islands in Loch Lomond from our as-yet-unnamed boat:

A gorgeous day on Loch Lomond, The Trossachs

This weekend the weather went back to its normal dreich, rainy craptasticness, so it was totally on with the octopus.

Here's how far I got on Saturday:

Octo-progress!

And then I did a bunch more on Sunday:

More progress - note the "Sucko-matic" fume extractor the Scotsman built for me in the background.

Getting there - next up, the last tentacle with all of the suckers. Shudder.

That lower tentacle is probably going to need some re-working. I started getting tired and just jamming whatever shreds I could find in there, which Will Not Do. I should force myself to just knock off working when I start getting really tired. I just make mistakes.

Speaking of mistakes, here's a small FYI for anyone who is thinking about doing stained glass as a hobby: be ready to get lots of cuts on your hands. Lots. Seriously. When you work with glass, you start to look like a mad paper cut fetishist. Owie!

That's about all the news. See you next time, when I'll (hopefully) have that upper tentacle finished and the copper foiling underway!

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Octopus progress

Hi all, I made a bit of progress over the weekend on the stained glass octopus I started last week. One of the things that still perplexes me about cutting glass is how you can cut and cut for hours and it barely looks like you accomplished anything at all!

Although it doesn't look like it, I really did get quite a bit done. I plan to put lots more time toward it this weekend coming up. Just got to keep plugging away until it's finished.

First, I got started on the water background. I decided that the background needed to have a more emphatic design element to it, so I added a circle behind the octopus. The clear glass is Spectrum clear baroque, and the blue circle element is pale blue Spectrum baroque. I chose these because of the lovely swirls in the glass, so suggestive of underwater currents.

Hours and hours of cutting - looks like I barely worked on it at all!

Then I cut another one of the tentacles and added in the yellow eyes.

Yellow eyes - I plan to paint in the pupils.

Can't wait to get started on the little suckers. Except for the "can't wait" part. Eeep!

Wish me luck, and see you next time! Pin It Now!