Our artist friend, Lynde Mott helped Jeanne come up with a landscaping plan this year. This week we laid down a layer of newspaper on the grass and added potting soil and garden soil on the newspaper. Then we layered on steer manure to create a wonderful planting bed.

Here Jeanne is sweeping out John truck. John is our home teacher who brought us a load of wood chips.

Here you see the large pile of organic material.

Here the bark mulch is laid down and Jeanne is planting our plant starts.

And here it is all planted. What does this have to do with stained glass? We make garden stakes out of glass and gardening gets you in touch with the creator and all life!

New Star Students

Sadie and Eli came to a couples star class last night. They were extremely friendly and capable, easy to complete the stars they made.

Jeanne wondered why class went on for three hours since they were so good at building. It must have been that we were all having a good time (I wasn't there much..working on computer)

Eli says he'll help build a better logo for us, all we have to do is register at www.elance.com and look for gimme logos.
We've said it often, the reason we love teaching classes is because we get to meet such nice people.

Today, Dane came with me to help make patterns for a huge entryway. Dane doesn't get out often due to his injuries, but he has great upper body strength and is very good with heights. So this was perfect since we had to do 17 tracings of panels..up off of the ground.

The paper patterns took nearly an hour and it took an hour each way to get there, but that was a well spent three hours. Dane insisted that Jeanne needed to go with us and it turned out that she was able to cut patterns to size as we fit them. She and I moved the scaffold several times, taking Dane for a ride. It was a pretty good adventure..we still don't have an approval on the design that we're working on but it looks like a pretty sure thing that we'll get this job. Now if they didn't need it completed by the end of June!

The pattern was drawn using AutoCAD and as we put the pieces in place most were right on, but several were off by a considerable margin. This is why we do it on paper before doing it in glass.