Turtle or Turdlo?

Back when one of my daughters was a toddler she had a tendency to add “lo” to certain words.  Squirrel became Squirrlo, turtle became turdlo, squid became squidlo and so on.  I would gently correct her but soon she started doing it deliberately and get the biggest kick out of my feigned indignation: “It’s squirrel not squirrlo”. It was a fun little game.  Good memories.

So what does a turdlo have to do with the next piece I put together.  I guess I’m trying to suggest something about the mixed feelings I have over how it turned out. 

I had a pot melt that I accidentally broke into a couple of pieces and I decided to go ahead and break it up some more and re-fuse the pieces into pendants.  The problem was the pieces that I had fused seemed to be a bit oversized for pendants.  I started arranging them on a 10 X 10 glass plate and at first I though I could make them look like a very abstract school of fish swimming in the sea.  Well that wasn’t really coming together to well but as I arranged the pieces I began to see another pattern beginning to form.

Here is the “turtle” tack fused to the glass.

I decided to fill in the turtle’s body with medium opaque green frit and use transparent blue for the ocean.  I dug through my scrap glass bin and found some pieces that looked fairly organic and sea shell like.

Here’s how things came together in the kiln.

Here’s the result after a contour fuse (1400 Deg @ 10 minutes).

Wow.  Yeah I suppose it came out “OK” but I’m seeing two problems with this.

1. I had envision the turtle’s body having sharper boundaries and I’m not really sure why I thought using medium frit would provide that.  It looks kind of sloppy to me.  But then again this is an abstract piece so then…well…whatever.

2.  I should have used a lower fusing temperate. it should have been more ink the tack fuse range like 1350.  the “sea shell” pieces I added pretty much lost their surface texture and slumped too much.

So is it a Turtle or a Turdlo?