UPDATE (May 13, 2020):
I posted about our glass hearts in one of the groups that I joined during quarantine #aworldofhearts (it's been really awesome to see all of the sweet ways people are encouraging each other with hearts everywhere!!!) and it got a little crazy... in 24 hours, there were over 1200 likes and requests to buy the hearts... Today there are over 2600 likes and the admins had to turn off the comments. We've been getting messages asking for them to be sent to several places all over the states and people asking how they can buy or make them. Currently, Staci and I are trying to figure out how many of these orders we can realistically fill and what others we can refer to other glass artists making the hearts. It has been absolutely encouraging to see how much people want to show appreciation and encouragement to others. Pray that we can find a way to get the hearts into the hands of the people who need them most. Here's a link to the original post on FB:
Sometimes as an artist, I produce awesome stuff - on purpose. (Note that I say SOMETIMES.) Most of the time, I have an idea in my head and I work at it and work at it and work at it and what I produce is close to my original idea or the idea has completely changed as I've worked on it. Still other times, I produce some blockbuster fails.
Occasionally, if the opportunity arises and I'm not pigheaded enough to chuck the whole project out amid the frustration of my inability to create the thing in my head, a blockbuster fail becomes my next favorite thing ever.
And those, my friends, are some of my favorite moments.
For instance, Staci and I have been working on a slew of fused glass hearts that we are sending out to health care workers and folks working the front line of this pandemic thing. We wanted to be able to let them know that they are being cared about, thought about, prayed for and appreciated by two artists here in Arizona. Most of the time we would do prayer doodles and such but since those are paper and paper can hold germs, we thought about using our scrap glass to create hearts for them instead. (Bonus - glass can be sanitized!) We also love the symbolism of it. Each heart is created from scrap glass from other projects. The original colored glass itself is beautiful and then as we piece the hearts together in two layers, it takes on another level of beauty. Then we put the glass hearts in the kiln where for 8+ hours they are subjected to SERIOUS HEAT (1200 degrees at some points). The glass melts and cools and the end result is even more beautiful and stronger than the original material. Isn't that awesome? Do you see the analogy? How the stress of the intense heat takes something that was already beautiful and makes it something even more beautiful and stronger? That's our prayer for the folks we are making these for. That this heat of the crisis will make them stronger and more beautiful than before. A positively transforming experience out of a hellish situation.
So back to the brilliant fail being made awesome. When assembling the hearts, we generally use two layers of glass. One colored and one clear (sometimes both layers are colored). Earlier this week, I was putting a batch of hearts together while watching TV (yes, yes Supernatural... thank you, Netflix) and I wasn't really paying close attention to what I was doing (hello... Jensen and Jared. Duh.) and managed to glue several of them together of all clear glass. Both layers. Just clear glass. When I realized it, I was pretty ticked at myself and I started going through my options. I thought about trying to break them apart and fixing them but I'd used Krazy glue and that wasn't going to happen. I thought about tossing the mistakes and pretending they'd never happened (I know, I know... Just a bad idea all around.). Thankfully, I couldn't lie to Staci like that. So... I texted her and told her what I'd done, pretty chagrined that I'd just "wasted" a decent amount of our clear glass.
Here's where the awesome starts. She said, "Hey, we have that cool bubble stuff that we bought for almost nothing when the glass store closed... what if we try some of that on the clear glass hearts? If it doesn't work, no worries. But what if it DOES work? They could be our favorite yet!!!"
So that's what we did. We slathered on some of that "cool bubble stuff" and TADAAA!!!!
They're our favorite yet. Seriously. The most awesome mistake ever.
So remember this the next time you make a mistake - maybe it will turn out to be something amazing. (Try sharing it with a good friend you trust if you can'd find the silver lining yourself.)
-Andie
PS: Yes, at some point we will probably be selling these on the Etsy store...
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