I had the opportunity to participate in a glass fusing class at The Crucible, in Oakland. The idea is to cut pieces of glass and arrange them into a pattern. Then, they toss it into an oven for 24 hours and you end up with a nice decorative tile.

I’d never done anything like it before so I wasn’t sure what to make. I settled on trying my last name “Kobayashi” in Japanese kanji.

The standard process is to cut the glass into squares and create a simple mosaic so creating pieces of glass to look like stylized brush strokes was a bit of a challenge. But I was feeling pretty good cutting and grinding that first piece of glass into the right shape until I realized I had spent a third of the time doing 1/11th of the strokes, and that wasn’t even including the background glass that had to be cut and shaped. So the rest of it was a lot more rushed.

Fortunately, I got faster the more I did it. I learned to focus on the larger shapes and not get bogged down in the details so much. I think there’s a metaphor for life in there somewhere.

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