We celebrated Alison's 55th birthday in Lexington over the weekend. It was a low-key affair, focusing on good food, good drink and a long, solitary walk on the Chessie Trail.

My gift to Alison was a new mosaic featuring a heart-shaped ceramic pendant that we had picked up somewhere in our travels. It sat on my workshop bench for a couple of years before I decided what to do with it. This gift is titled Love at the Double Nickel. Pictures are below.

Should you desire, you can send Alison birthday wishes of your own at [email protected].

My sister Liesl asked me to create a stained glass panel for the half-moon window in her dining room. The primary color needed to be pink, of course, to which I added green, gray, black and white. Those colors were used to create an arbitrary geometric pattern in the bottom half, while the top half features three penguins floating on a variety of clean glasses. It's been pointed out to me that I've reproduced the Sweet Frog color palette. As big a fan as I am of their frozen yogurt, that is nothing more than a coincidence.

I've just finished my largest mosaic to date, six feet wide and one foot tall (that's 14 linear feet). It is titled "9A", inspired by a Jackson Pollock painting titled "Summertime: Number 9A", a favorite of mine.

The original is on display at the Tate Gallery in London; mine is on display at Grace Underfoot on Lakeside Avenue.

Click any photo to enlarge it.

We're starting to run out of wall space in the house. After all, we did remove a large wall separating the kitchen and living room last summer.

So, my latest mosaic wound up in our master bathroom over the commode. Conveniently, its blue and green colors match the circa-1970 tiles in the room.

The larger, multi-color mosaic is actually the second one I ever made, back a couple of years ago, but it was looking for a new home and also landed in the bathroom, our "New Art Frontier."

My latest stained glass project was a mosaic. This one took a while, mostly because I chipped away at it an hour at a time on the weekends that we were lucky enough to spend in Lexington.

This project was actually commissioned by Alison. We had a painting hanging in the stairwell that she feared would be bleached by the sun streaming through the skylight overhead. A mosaic is a perfect replacement, as the glass is unaffected by sunlight.

Believe it or not, there's actually a discernible pattern to this design -- it is not random. If you can figure it out, let me know.

As for its title, Alison named it after characters in the classic Rudolph claymation television show, inspired (I think) by the predominantly white design.