I've been asked several times about where I get my tesserae or tiles. 

I purchase roughly 1 foot squares of stained glass and cut the tesserae myself. I do this for several reasons. First, I like stained glass. I like glass period. One day I want to learn how to blow glass but that costs money for classes. I would absolutely love to create Roman replica blown glass pieces, but that's for another time, if ever.

Second, I know that some of the mosaics in Herculaneum were made with glass. If they could do it, why not me?

Third, I want to make small mosaics with small tesserae. I suppose I could have done small with other mediums, even Smalti glass, but I wanted to make whatever size tesserae I needed. 

Fourth, I have this idea, which admittedly is just an idea, that I can make the stained glass go further than the same dollar amount of other materials. I could be wrong. What do I know. Most of the glass which I have purchased has run between $10-15 per square feet, so to have a variety of colors is not cheap. I'm still thinking a square foot of Smalti glass would cost significantly more. 

I purchased most of my glass and tools at the beginning of the summer with retirement gift cards. I now have most every color I think I may need and I keep the glass stored vertically between newspaper, which makes it easier to flip through the colors when I'm looking for something. 

The tools I use include 

• a pistol grip oil feed glass cutter Tungsten carbide stained glass cutting tool
• glass nippers with carbine cutting wheels 
• glass running and breaking/grozer pliers​

I tried to make a few videos yesterday to demonstrate how I use these tools. In the first video, I failed to explain what I was doing at first when I was scoring the glass with the pistol grip tool, and then when I was using the glass nippers, the nippers were completely out of the screen. So I made the second video. However, the grey glass doesn't cut as neatly (and definitely didn't in the video) where as the blue is more cooperative. ( I don't know why this happens; I'm sure it may have to deal with the quality of the glass or the way it was cooled.)

So, again, this second video is much like the first except I explain what I am doing and you can see all the tools.

In this third video, you can see how I cut the glass into the smaller pieces. For the record, I am NOT squeezing the tool with my left hand. I am merely preventing the glass from shooting across the room. All of the hard work of squeezing the nippers is being done with my right hand, which is getting really strong!

As the video explained, I like to start with strips that are a centimeter wide, and then I snip them into roughly centimeter squares. I can easily make my tiny square tesserae from these, or cut the glass into little rectangles or triangles or whatever shape I need in between. 

If you were thinking that this is tedious, it can be. Usually I do it while listening to something. I may have the TV on to binge watch/listen to some old favorite series. Cutting tesserae is also good for listening to audio books. I find it soothing, admittedly, and in the end I have these little piles of gems. ​(And I am not snacking on food because my hands are busy.)

I've learned to keep them sorted by shape: little skinny rectangles, sharp triangles of all shapes, and four sided polygon shapes that help with curves. Makes it easier to find the shape that I need next, whatever shape that may be. 

​I had to cut up some more glass yesterday because I had run out of some of the shapes I needed. Doing the water background for the heron has been an interesting learning process. From this angle you can't really see the wave patterns in the green (more on right) and grey (more on left), though you can with the blue and yellow. I'm now shifting up to the area which will have more blue than green & grey. The patterns hopefully will stand out more when this is grouted. I think the show better in sunlight anyway.

I spent close to three hours cutting glass yesterday afternoon. I'm hoping that will be enough to get through at least half of what's left on this mosaic. 

And remember, I am new to making mosaics. I haven't taken any classes because of Covid. I've only met with my local mosaics guild twice this year. I have read a book or two on making mosaics and stared at a lot of Roman mosaics over the years. I am no authority; this is only my journey into the art of making a mosaic. 

And one last thing: be careful using your feet to pick up little glass tesserae which you've dropped on the floor. Although I have often gotten away with this because the tesserae are so small, I did prick my big toe last night and ended up with blood on my carpet. Eek!  I mean, you do of course need to be cautious because this is glass and keep your work area cleaned up.

I'm on the Birds of Texas group on Facebook. This photo, which I have cropped on the left and added lines, was taken by a gentleman named Ed Ferrin in Galveston, Texas. I love herons. We get them around here but I haven't taken any picture as lovely as this. I wanted to see whether I could possibly create a two-part mosaic with a top panel and a bottom panel (the reflection). 

Based on what I've learned from previous mosaics, I am doing the real heron in opaque glass and everything else will be transparent stained glass. I spent a lot of time cutting up tesserae and sorting them into little containers. I have every color and shape I may need, though I am sure I will need to cut more before I'm even finished with the first part.

I like making my mosaic on mirrors. It provides a simple, solid background that reflects light. But unlike clear glass, I cannot just put my pattern underneath the glass. However, I still have overhead markers leftover from teaching so I made a grid and sketched out the heron. 

I tried to follow the direction of the feathers in placing the tesserae, but I couldn't do it every time. The different shades of grey of the wing, back and upper legs are all from the same piece of stained glass. 

Admittedly I am trying to take color cues from the photo. The water is more green glass on the right with highlights of grey and blue, while on the left it is more grey with highlights of green and blue. 

I took my project outside to get better light; you can see the colors better here. Sometimes I think you can see that I am making wave patterns, but other times it looks messy to me. The larger of the two yellow sections on the left will probably be removed. I think it's too much. My intention will be working in more blue as it moves up, with some yellow highlights, but I think the yellow will need to be used sparingly. 

I am concerned that there isn't enough color contrast and the heron will be washed out like my painted bunting. However, I am hoping that if I hang my mosaic where there is good light, the contrast between transparent and opaque will be enough. I want that sparkling, coruscating effect that is difficult to capture in a photo. But maybe... maybe this glass will do it.

And yes, I have thought of not totally filling in the mirror. I could do that. And I probably will make some like that in the future. It would certainly be easier and faster. Not to mention potentially profitable. I can tell you that filling in this whole mirror is slow and tedious. Well, maybe not truly tedious because I do find it relaxing.  But I'm betting I have at least a couple more weeks minimum to finish filling this in. 

I am going to grout. I walk past the blue flower mosaic every day and like the look of the grouted yellow/gold glass. Maybe one day I will play with resin. But for now, I want to feel connected to my Roman/Greek ancestors. (I am half Greek; I feel half Pompeian, but I'm not sure that counts.)

Stay tuned for the finished project.

​I had been disappointed (but not too terribly so since it was only my 2nd mosaic) in the painted bunting on the sunflower. There was not enough contrast between the bird and its background. The hedgehog mosaic used opaque glass for the hedgehog and clear for the background in order to improve the contrast. I thought I had my the contrast problem beat until I grouted. I realized that even though the gaps I was leaving were small, they were still big enough to alter the color and design. 

So, this was to be my experiment with how tight I could glue the tesserae and still grout.

My flowers are stylized and simplified. I used the yellow gold clear glass for the background with pale yellow foggy glass for the wind. The single big leaf is opaque glass like the flowers but I made the grass from transparent green glass and used a few tesserae as sort of artistic accents or something. Here is the mosaic before grouting. I almost didn't grout it because I liked it so much this way. However, the whole point of this mosaic was to see what the grouting would look like if the tesserae were tightly set.

(Here is the final product. Overall I was pleased with the the grouting. However, in my efforts to not have excess glue, there were places that clearly I didn't have enough glue and the grout got underneath the glass. (Mainly lower left area.) That was unforeseen. 

I have it on my wall by my front door. I think it still looks neat and is definitely my best mosaic so far. But maybe... maybe I won't grout the next mosaic. 

I had this idea that with retirement would come art classes and workshops and new people. But of course because of Covid19, we are all doing things differently. So I have struck out on my own with making mosaics. 

My first mosaic was based on a photo of Pompeii, taken by the wonderful Prof. Sophie Hay. I liked the warm light of an early morning over the ruins with, to me, the focus on the road leading in. 

Looking at this photo even now, I get tingles and want to walk down that road and enter that amazing little town from another lifetime. I'm sure there are ghosts of ancestors there who would speak to me. For some reason, perhaps in my quest to try to do something interesting with light, I picked this photo for my first project. 

With generous retirement gift cards in hand (and a mask), I headed to Blue Moon Glass​ to purchase tools and glass. Glass isn't cheap, but it is pretty, especially once you start cutting it up into 1/4 inch size tesserae or smaller. There was and is something oddly therapeutic just cutting up the glass and making pretty piles of gems...

I purchased some small square and round mirrors to use as a base. For my first endeavor, I grabbed one of the little 5 inch square ones and started gluing. I had to do a lot of simplification for the background, the vegetation, and most of the ruins, but I thought my gate and street were okay, at least before I grouted it.

I spent about a week trying to decide whether to use light or dark grout, and after a suggestion from an experienced artist, I went with dark grout. 

Admittedly, I was disappointed but not discouraged. I thought the dark grout really cancelled out the lightness of the road as well as highlighted all of the problems and inconsistencies. But you gotta start somewhere.

Next I turned to nature, thinking like a good Roman. I have always admired the frescoes and mosaics of birds in Pompeii and elsewhere, so I found a suitable photo for inspiration. 

I liked the challenges this image posed plus it included colors that I already had. Whereas with the first mosaic I started at the top, this time I decided to start at the bottom to try to get the sunflower right. I drew a grid pattern on the image to better visualize spacing and relationships. 

This mosaic is actually larger than the first one, probably 7' X 7'. As I said, I started with the sunflower, which began pretty rigid and aligned. I then worked on the flow of the leaves with some success, I think. As for the bird itself, I started with the outline of the chest/body in the normal square tesserae but soon switched to the skinny half-size pieces. I really should have gone back and replaced that original row with other skinny pieces, but didn't see that at the time. The beak and the head, I thought, looked a little better before grouting. I am learning that everything looks better before grouting, but more on my thoughts about that later. 

I think I was doing all right on relative perspective and size until the bird, which is a little off. I'm not too displeased about that. After all, I was not tracing a pattern since I was working on a mirror and not glass, but was eyeballing it. 

Finally I wanted the background, which is blurred in the picture, to have a feeling of flow. And while it does have that, it does not provide the right contrast. The bird is totally lost in the green because they are the same value (that may not be the right term). They are both strong colors.

To get an idea of the relative size of the above two mosaics, I decided to include a picture of the two on my wall in my kitchen.

I loved how bright and cheerful the blue circle edging was. I had been very careful to keep my spacing even. And making the hedgehog, after the face was done, was relatively easy. I had this brown opaque glass that had several different shades. Thus all of the spines you see were from the same sheet of stained glass. Admittedly, I was worried that the spacing was too tight, compared to the nice spacing I had in the blue area. The only area I felt needed real improvement was the area of blue adjacent to the spines. It lacked consistency and I thought was way too tight, maybe too tight for the grouting. But otherwise, I was very pleased ... until I grouted.

(I wrote this post back in 2017. I still think it is important, even more so with the growing push for more spoken Latin / Comprehensible Input.)

We are the new scribes. To Macron or Not to Macron, That is the Question--no doubt. It is a question that comes up quite a lot, and it came up again today.

A discussion began privately (small group email) regarding how to add macrons when typing in MS Word. Various people suggested this keyboard or that, but I piped in with how to map keystrokes to make it easy to type.  Here is how to do it for those who still don't know how:

You need to assign keys to the macrons.  I use ALT plus the vowel; ALT plus SHIFT plus the vowel for capital vowels.

So do this:

Go to:
INSERT menu
SYMBOLS
MORE SYMBOLS & find the letter you want. THEN choose
SHORTCUT KEY (bottom left button)
in the "Press new shortcut key" press ALT plus A (for a lower case long a), then
ASSIGN

Now you can just hit that combination of keys and the letter appears.

I can type almost at full speed with this.

But then someone I love and respect threw in his two denarii that he doesn't use macrons. And while I respect his view and know I will never change his view, I'm always thinking about the new teacher or person I can influence. So I wrote this in return:

... I fully believe in the importance of learning the sound of each word of Latin that enters my head, and the macrons are just representations of those sounds. I don't need them for the cases; those are totally internalized. But when I meet a new word--which for our students is ALL THE TIME--I want to be able to look at that word and, because I know the rules for dividing and accenting words, be able to know immediately what that word SOUNDS like and to fix it in my head.

Children can ask parents how to pronounce English words. I can ask my Merriam Webster app to even pronounce words for me.  But Cicero isn't here, and in my room I am supposed to be the authority. I am supposed to be modeling the best Latin I possibly can. I have heard presenters at conferences mispronounce words putting the accent on the wrong syllable because they weren't aware of (or, dare I say, didn't care about?) a long vowel.  And it isn't a long vowel, remember; it's the way the word SOUNDED--and it can and does change where you accent a word if it is in that penultimate syllable.

I certainly have friends and colleagues who are more fluent than I am conversationally. (I was never good at small talk, and always went to bed earlier than others at Rusticatio.)  I like to listen to Latin though. I like to read it aloud too.  And I want to sound as Roman as I possibly know how. I did dramatic interps for JCL in high school, which I'm sure influenced me. But I was also influence by the great Rick LaFleur in this regard (see what he says on pronunciation in Wheelocks), and I notice that Nancy Ll. and Justin SB ALWAYS (or certainly almost always) include macrons.

The more words I *fix* in my own head, the easier it is to read without them when a text doesn't have them. I don't rely on them like a crutch and I tell my students why I always have macrons on materials and how they too should be fixing how the words sound in their own minds. Or trust that when they had macrons in front of them, that they were, even inadvertently, building a proper mental representation of that word so that when the macrons aren't there they can trust their gut instinct on the word.

For teachers who think of this as an onerous task, I say to just take it a word at a time. Reading aloud with thought and care and really "tasting the words" as I believe Rex Harrison once said (his argument against speed reading) is half of it. Taking an extra few seconds to check a dictionary on the words you are unsure of is the other half. And while the macronizer isn't bad, I would never rely on it.

***
New teachers and those of you who train teachers, this is important. When I was first teaching middle school Latin, I started by deciding that I would do my best to master those words used in the textbook, and I would master those sounds with each new set of vocabulary I introduced. I learned with the students. You often do--that is, as a teacher you often learn a lot of your trade while teaching. There are many, many things not taught at universities, or things that are unimportant to professors who are more concerned with the subject of their research (not being critical, just observant). But we are entering a new age of Latin teaching, where incorporating speaking proficiencies to help develop reading proficiencies is becoming of greater importance than ever before. There is no more critical time to CARE about how Latin sounds and why we have macrons. And yes, Romans didn't need them because they WERE fluent, they WERE able to ask mom and dad and their teachers how to properly pronounce a word just like we are able to in English. And since we can't surround our students 24/7 with quality spoken Latin, we do what we can to make sure their INPUT is quality.

So I include macrons, practice a little divide & accent from time to time, and tell them that when they read Latin, they should either read aloud or HEAR IT in their heads.

The craziest thing happened.  I retired from teaching Latin this year. 

I have been pretty seriously burned out for a while now, whether it was from teaching on block scheduling, stress over certain aspects of my Latin program, commuting, or just getting older. 

It is giving me time, however, to live like a human being. Since spring break I have been eating breakfast at my table and not in my car. I get 7+ hours of sleep each night. And I have begun to make mosaics out of stained glass. There is something very soothing about about snipping the glass into tiny tesserae; something meditative and relaxing about slowly gluing the tesserae into place. I haven't even grouted my first mosaic yet, but you can see the cut glass in the headers of my new website.

I am in the process of shifting all of the materials and things I had on my previous website(s) to this website, so if you are looking for a special set of Google Slides I've made on dividing and accenting or SID SPACE, they will be available again soon. I hope.

​I also had problems with my previous blogsite which had been an emergency shift after I discovered that livejournal was Russian controlled! So if I can, I will repost some of the things I wrote in years gone by when I was filled with energy and passion. 

So, keep watching this space. Or not. But maybe I will be finally rebuilding things... on top of the ashes of the end of my career.