There are more pictures than text in the last two postings so scroll down to see all the pictures of the final construction of the onion and the move to a downtown Walla Walla street. I am also giving you pictures of the other three onions that are complete. Supposedly one more is coming tomorrow, but those of you who are following this might want to see the creative things other folks did with a fiberglass globe. Keep reading to see my last post in the saga of the onion.

The onion is in place at the corner of Main St. and Colville St. in downtown Walla Walla, but I need to catch you up on how we ended this saga---sorta!

I left you in the last posting with the soldering taking place. The top and the base. The top is copper with an antiquing technique perfected by Ron. It blends beautifully with the copper colored glass and appears as a seamless whole. The base is black with strands of "roots" peeking out from under the onion. There is also a name plate and information on Gilded Glass and the artists who created the onion. There was much lifting and holding and it took two days. Ron and Floyd working non-stop. I fed them frequently! Worried aloud that they were about to drop the onion on the floor and tried to cheer lead, when I wasn't terrified of a last minute catastrophe.

Floyd did some mop up on the top with grout and some missing tiles. Then the two guys painted the bottom black--after soldering and attached the name plate. This was finished on Thursday night very late. [Keep in mind the WW Sweet Onion Festival starts Friday night.] The three worker bees sat in a quiet and very messy studio and stared at this enormous vegetable of glass and sighed and allowed as how we would miss her. Letting go was going to be hard, even though none of us wanted to say it aloud. Ron headed for home and three days off. . .he told Floyd he didn't want to watch the move.

Moving day was aided by a wonderful fellow from Tumac Machinery (local John Deere dealer). He told our friend Judy Stein that he has spent years helping Walla Walla "get art" and it pleased him no end. Apparently he has assisted with the installation of other pieces of art work. He arrived with a "shower cap" for the onion and carefully loaded into a truck.

A woman who worked for Nancy and Floyd years ago, Sara Strickland, has returned to Walla Walla and is a quite accomplished photographer. On Wednesday she did some new photos for us that showed us in our current thinner persona. We invited her to take pictures of the onion if she wanted and she jumped at the chance. She doesn't work on Friday, so we hung out down town waiting for the truck with the onion and talked and talked. It is so good to have her back in our lives. I included one of our favorite pictures from the collection she took. It is terrific. Anyway, she gets the credit for many of today's picture postings.

The next stop for the onion and Floyd was Tumac Machinery, where "Sweet Reflections" got her base. 300 lbs. of concrete. To keep it from blowing away or walking away in the back of some teenagers truck. We now know that she weighs about 103 lbs, without her base.

Then the onion moved downtown in the truck. The forklift from our local newspaper, the Walla Walla Union Bulletin arrived and the onion was moved from the back of the truck to the ground, where the pallet was removed in a wobbly and scary manner to grace the corner. A reassuring factor is that the onion is positioned to provide a perfect view to police security cameras. The onion is likely to stay downtown for several weeks, maybe the summer and then move to the airport. . .at least that is the current plan.

Floyd did one last cleaning job and "Sweet Reflections" became public art. Floyd, Sara, and I sat in the car and watched people come racing down the sidewalk and break stride to slow up and walk over and touch the glass. . .not good for a glass piece sitting in 85 degree sunshine. Hands off quickly. There were teenagers, old ladies, and small children checking it out. It truly is amazing how much art can contribute to a person's everyday life when it is easily available.

We are still at the office trying to reclaim our regular lives [as if anything in our lives could ever be characterized as "regular"] and preparing for weekend festival activities. Floyd will be selling glass at Farmer's Market and sharing a notebook titled "The Story of Sweet Reflections." This story comes to an end, but not really, the onion will be here for a long time.

Soldering has begun and continues as I type this missive. The big brown onion is beautiful with its grouting. Sorry no pictures, but the guys had it wrapped up in bubble wrap and painters tape before I could get there with a camera. The bubble wrap is an attempt to protect the glass tiles from scratches or coming dislodged as the soldering goes on and probably for the move. (although the grout has made the thing pretty sturdy! I keep reminding myself that there are mosaics from the ancient days of Greece and Rome that are in pretty good shape today.)

Once it was bubble wrapped Ron started removing tiles from the top so the soldering would look as if it comes out of the tiles, a wonderful design concept. So, much picking and scraping was done! Then the immense, unwieldy onion was tipped on its side for soldering. Can't solder on it upright, as the solder is liquid when applied and would just run off, right into the bubble wrap. . .imagine how that would smell!

Photos show you Floyd holding the top, sorta flat, Ron wielding the hot soldering iron to apply the first of the solder. Then the top is rested on the back of a chair with rollers (Yep, rollers! I keep leaving the studio room with anxiety attacks!). Ron does detail work on the top while Floyd holds the chair in place and I presume is prepared to snatch the top if it heads toward the floor. A lot of good that will do!

I have Bible study tonight with a friend and dinner, so I am vacating the premises whilst the fellows continue bouncing the onion around and applying solder. At one point both of them were using irons, and Floyd was holding it up with his other hand. Good thing I have my hair colored. . .or it would be gray from worrying.

The soldering process is likely to take a few more hours before we see any real results. More pictures and narrative as soon as it seems prudent. We are arranging the "move" tomorrow or the next day, as the onion festival starts on Friday. It will be somewhere in the downtown area of Walla Walla for a few weeks and its likely home will be the Walla Walla Airport Terminal building. A lovely new building and much safer than on public streets. We are most happy to have new people to Walla Walla be greeted by our onion. . .not ours for much longer! Like getting ready to lose an old friend.

As promised there are pictures of the grouting. I start with a picture of the completed tile work. Notice the white between the tiles. That while is almost gone, as I pen this missive.

The grouting begins with mixing the dry grout with water. Floyd has decided to go "dryer" for this project, as he doesn't want to loosen too many tiles. I have done art mosaics for three years and even on a flat piece it is virtually impossible to avoid losing a few tiles. I had a nightmare last night that we grouted today and came in the next day to sheets of grouted tiles lying on the table. It wasn't pretty. So, Floyd is being really conservative in how wet the grout is. It has a tendency to migrate beneath the glass and could dislodge poorly adhered tiles. The picture is Ron mixing up a small batch of grout. The guys are working in small sections

The heat isn't helping. We have air conditioners and fans going as it is 95 + outside with wretched humidity. Dryer grout and fans blowing. Needless to say, the guys are working quickly.

The next step is applying the grout. The picture shows Floyd in our all time favorite posture doing this project. . .upside down under the edge of the onion. Ron, Lori, Floyd and Nancy all took that pose to adhere the tiles and now for the grouting. Tall Ron is doing the top and Floyd drew the short straw and is doing the underbelly of the onion.

After using a kitchen spatula to apply the grout, it has to be sponged off. There is a hazy quality to the glass because of left over grout, but it will wash off tomorrow when the grout has hardened a bit. Floyd will then polish with soft towels. A tedious job as best, but that is a way off as the soldering is the next step.

To show you the dramatic effective of the difference in grout and no grout, I managed to get a picture of a section where the grouted side is on the left and the non-grout is on the right. Even with the hazy film of the left over grout it is a pretty dramatic difference. The onion just gets prettier and prettier by the minute. I think I may have to visit her for a while after she is gone from the studio.

The next step is the decorative soldering and painting the base. This is a concern as the onion needs to be manhandled, literally, by Floyd while Ron applies hot solder to the top and the base. We are all nervous about knocking out tiles, getting burned, melting the fiberglass, and a zillion other things that can go wrong. As usual, I do the worrying for all three of us. The guys just seem to take one step at a time.

We are also trying to figure out how to weigh the thing. Everyone asks how much it weighs and we thought people might be interested in how many tiles. NOT! At the moment however, the guys are focusing on making the grout look spectacular! And a fine job they are doing.

We are in the final stretch of this race. The Sweet Onion Festival starts on Friday of this week, July 18 to be precise! We spent the weekend cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. With mosaics the placement of the tiles is just the beginning. The first step in cleaning is brushing off the tiles, and with a rounded surface, trying not to knock off tiles! Then the fun begins.

Using exacto knife, tweezers, and dentist pick, you pull excess glue off the surface of any tile where it has strayed or is bulging out in between tiles. The excess glue prevents the grout from sticking in the crevices between the little tiles or it adheres to the glue on the surface of the tile and you end up with a big blob of glue covered with grout. Not attractive.

I used an old towel--not terry--to get dust and debris off when I started, then when I finished picking my way to oblivion on the excess glue, I used very fine steel wool to get off any glue remaining on the tiles. No, the steel wool does not scratch the glass. [Just anticipating your questions!] Then more wiping with the towel. As you can see in the pictures we used painters tape to mark where we had been and where the next person needed to start.

There were interruptions. We taught a class on Saturday and a mosaic student is finishing a piece and was in the studio at the same time. And Scott and Floyd put shingles on the front of our building, as they blew off in the storm in January.

The last part of the cleaning. . .or close to the last is vacuuming. Floyd uses a shop vac, because it will pull off loose tiles. Now that seems counter-intuitive on the surface, but better they be pulled off now than when he is grouting. Grout has to be done NOW! No walking away or stopping to put in tiles.

As I type this he is vacuuming away and using the exacto knife to do final clean up. The goal is grouting in the morning. I'll take pictures and post as he does this.

It is going to be hard to part with this visitor in our midst, but several commission jobs have materialized in the last month and we need to get back to making money. It looks like the onion is going in the airport terminal, but that is not definite. We are going to try to weigh the thing, as that is the first thing everyone asks. And for us it is all about the number of hand cut and fitted tiles!

The tiles are all the way to the base of the onion (hooray!), with the exception of about eight rows. Ron ran out of tiles and energy, I expect, last night. These last tiles have been especially hard to adhere. The mold of the onion takes a sharp turn inward at the bottom toward the base and despite sitting on the shortest stools in the world, you crane your neck into ridiculous positions to get the last pieces in place, without them being twisted in the wrong direction or leaving large gaps.

Lori found Floyd's "dolly" to move heavy stuff around in the office, pushed it up to the table and pulled the onion to the edge of the table. She then sat on it to put in the last pieces in one of the sections. She is a mechanical engineer and solved this intractable problem with her usual ease. Her help has been a God-send. I am not sure we would be as far along as we are without her help in gluing thousands of tiles.

The grout arrived and has been tested on the test tiles with both the brown and yellow glass and it looks wonderful. We are extremely pleased with the results of everything so far.

The next challenge is the decorative soldering. For the uninitiated here is the issue. Solder is lead and tin. You heat it with a soldering iron and it becomes a liquid, drying pretty quickly. It is used to hold flat class pieces together and has been used for centuries. (Don't get Floyd started on the cups of hot solder and pouring into joints of glass during the middle ages--you'll be bored soon, I promise!) So, if you try to solder on something upright (look at picture-top of onion), it would run right off. Decorative soldering, which is what Ron is doing, is even more difficult.

Decorative soldering is when you lay a bead of solder and then you add additional solder to give it texture and three dimensionality. I have given you a couple of pictures of decorative soldering so you can see what it will look like. But, there is a problem with the onion, as the parts to be soldered are about as vertical as you can get at the top and sloped at the bottom.

As with everything related to the onion project this has posed a problem. Get a jack for the top and put it on its side and roll it as Ron solders? Lay it on its side on the work table? We have all been fussing about it since about half way through the tiles. Nancy mostly nagging, Ron musing, Floyd offering alternatives. But, Lori really raised the biggest issue. Fiberglass mold, very high heat--What happens, melting? noxious fumes? distortion of the mold? EEEEKKKK!

And a house guest to the rescue. Nancy and Floyd's pal, Connie Pirtle is visiting from back East. She said, "What if you created a sleeve you could work on off the onion and then slide onto the top of the onion when done or glue the roots for the base of the onion. [The bottom or base is black (dirt) with solder lines replicating the roots of the onion]. Ron seems taken with this idea and he and Floyd are on a mission today to find some rubber goo to go over the top to make an exact mold, plaster of paris in the mold, and then copper foil on the mold where the work of decorative soldering will be done. Mind you, we are not sure it will work, but it is more promising than the onion falling off a jack!

We also have learned more about the fate of the onion, thanks to Michael Davidson of our tourism office and an article in the newspaper. You can read about it and see pictures of the two completed onions that are on display downtown. Visit the newspaper Web site for more information http://www.union-bulletin.com/articles/2008/07/05/local_news/0807063onions.txt

It is Saturday late in the afternoon and I taught a mosaic class today, with the large onion on the end of the work table looming over a handful of students. A living example of what is possible in the realm of mosaic art. Walking into the studio and seeing the onion come together, where you can visualize the final product is pretty nifty!

The big decision of the week was the veins in the onion. Ron and Floyd settled on a yellow that is complementary to the bronze color of the "skin" of the onion. I am loading two pictures for you to see it close up. Keep in mind that the white of the "frame" of the onion will go away when grout is applied. More about grout later. The three of us are so tired of cutting and snipping and gluing that there was little discussion about the color of the veins, it just happened.

Someone visiting the studio asked if we would build another one, if someone asked us and all three of us looked at each other and said yes, but it would cost a fortune. This one is for the "art" of it. But, it is quite elegant and if it ends up in a public location with lots of people being able to visit it, we will be happy.

Grout. Nancy, the mosaic teacher, has been nagging about grout for weeks. Neither Ron nor Floyd wanted to discuss until we were closer to the end. . .not something Nancy, the planner, particularly appreciates. But, as we near the end grout is looming and so experimentation is underway.

The first step was to check commercial non-sand grout at Home Depot. Close and we can use in a pinch, but none of us really like it. We decided that we want the grout to be as close in color to the tiles as possible. So, using fabric dyes to tint white grout, we will commence making practice tiles to get the right effect. As I key this in Floyd is gluing up practice tiles for us to experiment with color. Grout has the capacity to make or break a project, so this is a biggy! And the clock is ticking.

We got help this week from Nancy's friend Lori C. who glued, and glued and glued, when she wasn't fixing my errant Web page that I had screwed up. We sure can use the help. We all need massages of neck and upper back and I am developing a callus from snipping the tiny tiles, over and over. Made 340 this morning while mosaic students were working on projects.

You can write questions and comments. They are always welcome.