Daughters and Dots

My Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) chapter does not hold meetings from June through September. Our yearly meetings run from October to May. Some of our chapter members are Snowbirds and they head back up north for the summer. We locals, if we are not on vacation, get together a few times and have fun during the off months.

Back in July, we met at our Regent's (president of our chapter) house and had fun painting wine glasses. For under $30, an artist came to the house with all of the supplies (including the glasses) and guided us on our foray into glass painting. She had plenty of templates for things we could decorate our wine glasses with: shells, turtles, pineapples, starfish, palm trees, to list a few. One lady decided to free-hand a flamingo for her glasses. She did a good job too. I  chose to paint starfish on my glasses.

When I was in high school, I took art classes. I remember when I was first exposed to the painting technique called Pointillism. It is the process of using pure dots of color to create a picture. I like the look of Pointillism and it is a forgiving technique. One of the first pictures I created with dots in high school was this picture of peppers.

I eventually had it matted and framed and entered it for a 4-H Fine Arts competition. It won an award that allowed it to go to the state fair. My peppers won a Reserve Grand Champion ribbon at the state fair...the picture that won the Grand Champion ribbon was created by one of my sisters. I still create Pointillism pictures once in a while. The picture of an Ibis below was created a few years ago and it hangs on the side of my fridge.

So, back to my starfish on glass...The paint I used was acrylic and I used one of the templates our instructor had provided. She told us to take the little pieces of paper that had the patterns on them and put them inside the glass. Once the pattern was pushed against the inside of the glass, we stuffed paper towels in the glass so that the patterns did not move.

We each had two glasses to paint. I decided to paint a different color starfish on each of my glasses, one for The Colonel and one for myself (Heaven forbid we get our glasses mixed up and he drink from mine or vice versa...even after nearly 32 years of marriage I find it distasteful to drink after him).

It was a fun evening with the other ladies. We laughed and talked as we created our artworks on glass.

I was pleased with my paint job. I was eager to take them home to show The Colonel. He liked them. There were two ways we could "set the paint" on the glasses according to our artist guide. One way was to let the paint dry for three weeks. The other was to put your glasses in a cold oven and then bake them at 350 degrees for thirty minutes and finally let them cool down in the oven. I chose the oven method...who could wait three weeks to drink wine out of their works of art?

Not me!