I really enjoy my many hobbies. However, to keep making new items, I need to have a reason to do so. With most of crafts, I have found organizations to donate items to. This allows me to keep trying new techniques and ideas. The quilts I make are donated to Sleep in Heavenly Peace. The hats and scarves are donated to Hats and Mittens MN. Some of my glass art has been donated to charity auctions.

Unfortunately, I have not identified an organization that I can regularly donate glass art to.

This spring, while wanting a reason to work in my glass studio, I walked around my house looking for places that could use some new art. One of the areas I identified was our upstairs bathroom. About 15 years ago, I remodeled this bathroom and decorated with inexpensive coastal themed wall art. Since the pictures were starting to fade, it was time to redecorate again.

Keeping with the coastal theme, I made a couple underwater scenes for the tub room.

The background was made by contour fusing turquoise/clear steaky glass for the water and beige glass with medium frit of various shades of brown for the bottom of the under water scene.

I made coral with strips of beige glass and with fine frit shaped and then coated with frit powder.

Various types of sea life murrini and vitregraph stringers were added to create bottom of the sea the scene.

A second scene was made to create the top of the sea. White and blue frit was used to designate the top of the ocean. Clear and blue dichroic frit was formed into the body of a large jellyfish and clear dichroic stringers were shaped and placed for the tentacles. More murrini fish were added. Each of these pieces were contour fused and mounted in white frames.

To update the art to the sink room, I incorporated a couple of my hobbies – glass and quilting.

Glass “waves” have been a very popular by other glass artists, and something that I really wanted to try to make. After cutting an 8″ circle of clear glass, I used scraps of blue and turquoise glass along with coarse and medium frit. After placing the pieces of glass, the project was contour fused. The result was amazing and fit the intended area really well.

For one of the other walls in the bathroom, a couple of sailboats seemed like a good idea. And, after seeing several glass sailboats designs on-line, I really wanted to try to make one. I did, however, take a slightly different approach than those that I had previously seen. I purchased an inexpensive wooden boat ($9) from Amazon.

After removing the linen sails, I used a bench saw to cut the boat in half lengthwise, and added new masts to each boat.

The wood was painted with copper colored “Hammered Metal” spray paint. The glass sails were made with blue, green and white sheet glass and glass noodles, full fused. And, the sails were rigged with waxed sinew.

To enhance the look of the boats on the wall, I created a couple small “waves” (2″ in height) to match the larger wave that I had already made.

These pieces of glass art created another nice scene for the bathroom.

Lastly, I had one more wall to decorate in the bathroom. And, while thinking about this redecorating project, a small quilt that I had previously made matched the theme of the bathroom.

In 2018, I entered the Quilt On A Stick competition at the MN State Fair. The theme that year was “Up North” and I had made a sailboat with a mariners compass design. Unfortunately, the quilt did not receive a ribbon at the fair. And, since being made, I had been using it as a mug rug in my sewing room. But, now I had a much better use for this little quilt.

Because the quilt was small, I created a couple paper pieced lighthouse quilts from some photos. These quilts depict Split Rock Lighthouse in MN and the lighthouse at Harbour Town in Hilton Head Island.

These were all really fun projects to make, and a nice update to the décor of the rooms.