Shannon Kuchera, a good looking young girl, is a local artist, she has lived between Chelsea and Ann Arbor all her life and studied Psicology at University of Michigan, not Art and Design as you would expect.

“I took some art classes at the Residential College, I`ve always loved art!” she said, “I started working with mosaics as a hobby, about five or six years ago and I really just did it as a hobby. I wanted to do something for fun but I became addicted very quickly!”.

Kuchera stared taking mosaics classes from an artist in town. “I traded being an assistant in her shop during the day with free classes,” Kuchera said.

“Why mosaics? I know when I started, but why is really the hard to say. I think that at that point of my life I did a lot of drawings, mainly black and white. I just couldn`t stand color and so when I started working with mosaics I realized that the glass was already taking care of it. The glass, you know, it`s so beautiful. It was art itself! And it opened up this world of colors to me that I hadn`t really been able to wrap my mind around before,” she said.

The other things she said she loves about mosaics is the connection to the past, “It`s a tribute to something old,” she said.

Kuchera really enjoys her job and everyone at the workshop could feel it, “We usually have a lot of hands-on museums so when I saw her mosaics on the web site, I just fell in love with them. As they take a really long time, we decided for a mosaic jewellery workshop. We wanted to teach something that everyone can do at home, easily and free,” said a library employee.

“Everyone seemed to enjoy it a lot today and we’re definitely going to invite Shannon again in March hopefully, she got unanimously high marks in the evaluation – the highest actually!” she said.

Kuchera really wanted to share her passion for mosaics with the ones who attended the workshop and she totally did.

Not only adults enjoyed it, “The workshop was great, Shannon is very nice and I’d definitely do it again,” said a woman.
Kids came to make jewelry also enjoyed it, “I liked it a lot but some things were hard such as cutting the glass, I had my mum helping me! But I’ll do it again for sure!” said a 10-year-old.

I really enjoyed the workshop myself. I created a lovely necklace, and even though I’m not really good at crafts, I really did a great job with Kuchera’s help and a little of self-confidence.

Kuchera also shared with us her top rated websites to get the material. “Online is great! You can find everything you need, it can be a little tricky cause glass is heavy and it breaks pretty easily so shipping is a little difficult but it’s better than you might expect. There’s a great glass store in Lansing that has a lot of the staff that you need to get started. It’s called Delphy and they also have a website (delphiglass.com). There’s a wonderful shop in Chicago and they’ve a website too (tinypiecesmosaics.com),” Kuchera said.

“If you wanna start, Delphy is the place to get the glass and Tiny Pieces may be the place to get the best tools, it also has really great projects for mosaics and tons of ideas! They’re always getting new stuff and it’s always really cool stuff!” she said.

In addition to probably having another workshop in March at the Library, Kuchera’ll have a table at the Detroit Urban Craft Fair on 3 and 4 Dec.  at the Masonic Temple in Detroit, so if you wanna buy or just have a look at her work this might be great opportunity. You can visit her blog (mosaicgeek.com) for more pictures of her work.

Walking back in my house after the workshop I find a broken glass on the floor, as I’m throwing it away Kuchera’s words come to my mind, “Get creative, don’t throw anything away!”, on second thought the color of the glass really matches my new sweater.