I had the honor of making some birthday and mother’s day gifts for May Commissions. Of course, my mom got a Monstera leaf for mother’s day because she’s my #1 fan.

One of my mom’s besties growing up commissioned a sunflower for her niece’s birthday. I love hearing a little bit about the person I’m designing and crafting a piece for–it really informs the creativity and helps me design with more intention when I know a little backstory. This commission is going to a busy mother with a house full of love, who doesn’t have a lot of counter space in the kitchen, but loves to cook. She has a beautiful window above her sink and a sun catcher would add some light into her life. She’s especially fond of sunflowers, so I got to design my first sunflower sun-catcher.

There are plenty of sunflower patterns online but I wanted to draw something that was a little imperfect, slightly askew. Just like all the flowers I design, I prefer to keep the petals off-balance. Flowers in nature are always slightly imperfect and so gorgeously varied. Patterns that are too precise feel more like wallpaper to me. So I started by gathering inspiration online and dove into drawing on my iPad in Procreate. Once I had a design I liked, I picked a color scheme and approved the mock-up with my customer.

Picking glass is alternately the best and worst part of any design. I’m still learning to listen to my gut reaction when it comes to picking out glass, instead of waffling for hours over what shade of yellow is the perfect sunflower yellow. I selected a pale yellow Florentine glass sourced from Carolina Stained Glass, shout out to Suzie! Great shop with extremely helpful people and reasonable costs.

Once my customer approved, it was onto cutting, grinding, washing, wrapping, soldering, washing, buffing, washing, patina, washing, buffing, and polishing! I’m extremely pleased with how the copper patina lends to the yellow glass and the kokomo glass center.

It’s headed to California and I’ll be making a few TikToks and Instagram Reels from the soldering and patina process. Stay tuned!