This summer I’ve been trying to give my creativity a little boost, “freshen things up”, by doing new things. A couple of the online classes I’ve taken… well, those I fell behind on. There were no deadlines, so I didn’t feel compelled to finish anything very quickly. At the last minute this weekend, I decided to take a mosaic class at Apotheca. This is what I came out with after 3 hours:
The teacher, artist Lizz Van Saun, was great & very encouraging. I love her recycling ethic & the work she had on display was really beautiful.
Some progress pictures are below. For my piece, I didn’t have a plan when I started, so I tried for a spiral – something I often doodle. In my doodles, a spiral will spin off some stripes, then dots, then ever expanding triangles, lines and more dots. After placing the spiral, I knew I’d have to use a contrasting color for the background – dark purple was great. After a short while the purple became overwhelming after just filling in the center… so I mixed it up with the blue/green pieces. My usual stripes turned into the yellow and red triangles, and the 3 mirror pieces stand for dots. (One of these days I will have to do a fabric & bead piece of something I’ve doodled.)
We had about 2 hours to work on the design layout & at a certain point (1.5 hours) I realized that without tweezers, precision cutting and much, much, much more time I’d never get it finished if I didn’t just accept that this was my first-ever mosaic & to stop pushing for perfection. Having that time limit was almost freeing – I knew I had to get it done & at that point I stopped worrying about every irregular space.
I definitely felt like this was an indulgence, but I’m glad I did it! It took me out of my comfort zone for a while and I learned something new. 90% of what I usually spend my time with is yarn, fabric & beads – this was really something unique for me. Here’s one of Lizz’s pieces that I loved…to me, the green, blue and pink are so fantastic together and all the painted pottery pieces inside tie it all together:
I’m usually hesitant to take classes because I always feel that for the price, I can buy materials and just learn on my own, at my own pace. Since that hasn’t been working out for me with my half-completed online courses, this local, short-term class, worked out for the best. One 3 hour class and now I have a new hand-made piece I can add to my workspace wall!
Do you ever take classes out of your regular skills repertoire? Do you judge the value of these in terms of time and money spent, the finished work, or lesson learned?
Once again, the 
This was last year's and I had planned on making a new "giant pumpkin" doll each year. As I make each doll, their personality develops. Here's the bio that he came with: "This amateur grower is ready to enter his giant pumpkin in this year's County Fair (at 77 grams he may have to enter in the light-weight division!) When he's not working in his garden, he's studying his other passion, 
