Ready for Grouting

I started these two pieces several weeks apart and finished them one day apart. The heart frame took much longer because I had to figure out how to paint the frame to make the pale pink non-opaque tiles look good. The Pepto Bismol pink I tried first was not the way to go, nor was metallic purple, so I just kept brushing and sponging on more paint in the pink-purple part of the spectrum till I got something I was okay with. I don't love it, but it worked well enough for me to finish this piece. After grouting it I'll add maybe two more small embellishments, perhaps a dragonfly and a flower, to balance the lovely Creekmore-Durham glass tile on the left side of the frame. (One note: the tiles are not quite as crooked as they look; that's an artifact of the camera angle.)

The dragonfly piece above also uses a focal glass tile from Creekmore-Durham and took several part-days to piece because cutting and fitting the small glass pieces (the whole tile is just 5 by 6 inches) is much harder than working with large pieces. I also changed my mind on the blue for the "sky" and had to chip out a few glued-in pieces before proceeding; one hung on tenaciously and I couldn't even chip it out with a hammer and screwdriver (I passed on using the drill... flying glass shards and no medical insurance don't mix well), so I left the fragment and will accept an imperfect piece... ;-) I'll paint the little letter tiles (I made those! they read "you can fly") after grouting; I learned the hard way with another piece last week that grout is very hard on acrylic paint. Play, learn, and play some more...