So I took another class at Glen Echo.

This one wasn’t as fun as the beadmaking class, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, nothing beats the immediate gratification of the handmade bead. You’re messing with glass and fire and the next thing you know—boom!—you’ve got a bead. You have to wait for it to cool down, but that’s a matter of minutes.

Fused glass, not so much.

First you cut and glue. Then it gets fired. And it takes a good long time to cool down. Furthermore, what you put in the kiln is quite different from what comes out the next day. And unless you have tons of experience, you have no real idea what it’s going to look like, so it feels like a crapshoot.

The teacher for this recent class was nowhere near as good either. We learned on the second day that it was her first time teaching it. Another more experienced teacher showed up to help out on day two, and that made for an improvement.

There was a mighty lack of context: little explanation of materials or process, and no hand-outs about sources for supplies. It was totally project-oriented, which is fine. I guess I should look elsewhere (maybe the “First-time Fusers” class) for more of an overview.

And finally, my biggest problem with the class is that it produced items that—for the most part—are not really to my taste. I don’t go much for big showy jewelry, and the dichroic (color-changing) glass isn’t really my cup of tea. I guess the earrings and the little itty-bitty pendants are things I might wear.

Maybe I can give some of them away as gifts?

You could take your eyedropper tool and pick a pixel just about anywhere on the surface of this butterfly’s wings and find a beautiful color. It was a drag stopping with just six; many of the darker tones are incredibly lovely as well.

The underlying color scheme is monochromatic brown, and then there’s this dusting of graduated glitter on top. It looks to me as if someone took a rainbow-ink airbrush and swept it horizontally across the back of this butterfly from wing to wing a couple of times. Note how the stripes of iridescent color pass over the bump of the insect’s body.

All that intricate design on a creature no more than inch and a half wide. Who says you need a large canvas to make an aesthetic statement?

Some of the colors are still vibrant. A few of the petals remain soft and pliant. But the peak of perfection is past, and we are left with the withering, the drying, the veins and wilt of oncoming winter.

Fading beauty is beauty nonetheless. Sometimes I think I should start a blog called Lacrimae Rerum.

A subset of this area’s Thai restaurants have highly-designed interiors (there must be a favored decorator amongst the restauranteurs). While I generally feel that it’s overdone, I have to admire some of the individual touches, frequently involving unusual contemporary uses of metal. This spray of artificial cattails is a nice example.