Last week I was in Venice.
If you haven’t been to Venice, GO. It was amazing. It was more beautiful, gritty, exciting, delicious, and REAL than I could have possibly imagined. It was Diagon Alley, only full of boats and muggles. It was inspiring.
One of Venice’s main exports is Murano glass. The Venetians started making glass on Murano island in 1291 and have been going strong ever since. We saw a boatload of amazing artwork and got to see some glass demonstrations and oooooh it made me want to get my hands dirty.
This, in addition to my visit to the Tiffany glass museum in Orlando last month, is making me want to use glass and light together in exciting ways.
I’m starting simple, with mosaic tiles in resin. I’m quite liking the way this necklace turned out:
True to myself, I’m using new materials together with the glass. The setting is 3d printed and then painted silver. It looks pretty nice. I’m also playing with methods of finishing 3d printed ABS to make it shinier and smoother and less plasticy-looking, for the future, but I actually quite like the finish of this one.
So of course I had to put lights in. This is a super simple, one LED solution that runs off two coin cell batteries, which fit nicely into the back of the pendant. It turned out very mermaid-y.
I’m also working on a much more elaborate version, with around 25 LEDs and a microcontroller, but this super simple one is really delighting me. I want to try a few more times with a few more colors.. these are really nice, and I have put this one up for sale in my Etsy shop.
