A three-part praxis.

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There is, and has always been, a stained-glass workshop in my garage. When we move houses, it somehow mysteriously moves with us, even though there's little time to actually use it. It belongs to my mother, and it was my playpen when I was a little kid.



Hang on, what? What kind of mother lets her kid play with broken glass and soldering irons?



I can answer that. An awesome mother. She was always careful about jagged edges (and the edges of her glass were always perfect, so there wasn't as much need to worry about cut fingers) and sweeping up anything that got dropped. Glass is more fun than tinker toys or barbies, anyway.

So I started a project sometime around last spring, and it never quite got finished. I found this abandoned project in one of the cabinets. There was a piece that had already been cut, and another sheet of glass that was the same color.

It seemed like a good time to revisit the project, in the form of recreating that original piece of glass.



Isn't the color fantastic? The way the light bends through-

Okay. Sorry. Anyway, this is the shape of the original piece.



And the sheet of glass that I was going to cut to match the original was basically the same color and pattern, though of course there's a certain amount of individuality between each sheet of glass.

So the first thing to do was to trace the shape of what I would be cutting onto the larger sheet.



Then you take what has been known to me since childhood as 'that cutter thingy' and use it to score the glass. It leaves a trail of oil.



Then you can apply a little pressure and, if you've scored the glass deep enough, it pops apart easily.



And after a few more cuts...



They actually matched up pretty well!

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If nothing else, my EMT course has provided me with an enormous textbook. I flipped it open, and landed on a page about manual stabilization.



Closed the book.

Flipped it open again, and sadly didn't land on the same page. Instead, I ended up on a page about managing hostile patients. Not quite what I intended.



Closed the book.

Opened again, and ended up on the chapter about abdominal trauma. Hmph.



And one more time...

Finally, I flipped open to the page on manual stabilization. Success!

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I dropped a dishtowel on the floor. It landed in a rather perplexing manner.



I dropped the dishtowel a few more times, in an attempt to copy the original shape, and I didn't get particularly close until the third or fourth try, when I sort of threw it out of frustration. That worked surprisingly well.