Late April and May have been physically challenging to say the least. Whirlwind of pain, medications, confusion, illness, lethargy, maybe even a spot of existential panic.

I've not been in studio often, and when I am, I am more drawn to looking at very old pieces of past projects, or raw components for making larger things, than I am to creating a new project.

Handmade sheet glass from pre-2010, filled with air pockets and imperfections.

With family on my mind, I came in one day, delirious & discouraged, and created a portrait for each of us. I never did like how they turned out, but I preserve them as-is, as a testament to how I felt about my kin, that afternoon, that week, that year.

Left & middle undecided which is Mother and which is Child; right is Father. To the right a small grease marker sketch.

Detail of Mother?, flat black gouache and Phano grease marker.

Detail of Father, poured gouache and MSG solution, scratched with patterning.

Personal challenges abound this month, and yet symbolic objects, tiny projects, omen-like scribbles continue to emerge from my shop, egging me on, making me make.

The dyeing went wonderfully. The cats got into the skeins in the middle of the night, so they're looking a little bedraggled, but the colors took beautifully. I did a second round yesterday since the rig was already set up, where I tried various levels of dilution with spring water, and I love the results. Pastels on gleaming fibers, my dream!

Maybe I haven't gotten the hang of Parme Rose (some dyes are trickier than others), but I keep getting a camel-ish tone. It's lovely, but not as pink as I'd like.

I checked up on the salt-and-sequin pour. I find the result very humorous, but perhaps I've hit an end with this line of inquiry, at least for now.

These crystals are smaller and more uniform. I'm not a chemist but I assume the smaller puddle evaporated more quickly and didn't give it time to develop those lavish, massive encrustations from the earlier salt pour.

My father picked me up some Aji-no-moto MSG (monosodium glutamate) from the Japanese market and I left this guy in the studio today to dry down overnight. I'm a huge fan of MSG conceptually and practically, though I use it extremely rarely in cooking (once in a while, a pinch in a pot of rice is magic). There's so much cultural and gustatory interest in the chemical for me; the idea of "umami" is fascinating; the branding of this flavor-awareness as Asian-specific is also fascinating. It's less neurotoxic and scary than people think. I'd like to play with MSG as a material for a while...

Dust from an old cup trapped in the solution.

I unboxed some murrine I created in Kait Rhoads' fabulous workshop I took a few years ago and have been arranging them loosely while imagining some fused worry stones for anxious types like me. People are so fond of the idea of murrine being a cross-section, as well as the notion that it is drawn thinly to concentrate a pattern and give a high degree of intricacy. Of course this interests me, but I also like thinking of these murrine in a totally different way: as each individual piece being a prismatic little beacon that light shines THROUGH, giving geometric and colored light projections.

Finally, on my way out the door, caught the shop owners working hard on a Sunday night...