Project #11 Begins
I took a week or so off between the fish project and project #11. The nice thing about not putting any pressure on yourself is that there’s no pressure. Of course, that means it takes forever to do a project, but I cannot see myself quitting my day job anytime soon, so I may as well take ‘er easy and enjoy the ride. I was talking to my friend Stephen about my crisis of inlay faith a month or so ago, and he said that when you first start anything, you go from zero knowledge to competent in a fairly quick amount of time, but the learning curve isn’t quite so steep thereafter. To learn something new doesn’t take long; to become an expert takes a lifetime.
He’s wise, my friend. It was just what I needed to hear and remember.
So my goal for this weekend was merely to get the zillion pieces of pattern glued to shell. I hadn’t really thought through what I was going to use until I sat down with it. I’d had in mind that it would all be shell, a majority of it gold and black MOP. But the pieces are large, and shell didn’t seem right for some of it–too slick–and then I remembered I had a lot of wood available that would solve both my problems. So this will be mixed media. I’ve used shell and I’ve used wood, but never both together, so this should be interesting, but of all the designs I tried, this might actually the best one for just such an experiment. You can see a little hint of the original that inspired my design. It will be funky, if it isn’t a failure. But if it turns out, I’ll be tickled.
I did get everything glued AND my bench cleaned off so everything’s ready for sawing if I decide to get that ambitious tomorrow. I’ll be sawing for several weekends, I think; this has a lot of pieces and several piercings required.
I have my little fishy on my desk at work, and a coworker noticed it when she stopped in to talk to me the other day, so I showed her the others I had and told her a little bit about the process. She was interested and complimentary, and I was gratified. It’s nice to talk to people who don’t see every mistake you do. Right Ath? 
