We’re up to Day 16 of the Blogging U’s Photo 101 course. The subject today is “treasure.” The instructions given in this lesson tell us that “any object or experience that is deeply meaningful can be a treasure. Items, places, people — we all cherish something, or someone.”

No surprise here: one of the things I greatly treasure in my life is having the space, time, and capability to follow my love of working with stained glass.

The photo I took for this lesson shows the partial contents of a drawer containing scraps of glass left over from previous projects; scraps that are just waiting to become part of some new project sometime down the road.

My family used to put together jigsaw puzzles occasionally, and it was considered “cheating” to look at the picture on the box cover to figure out placement of the different components of the image. It was more of a challenge to figure it all out without knowing exactly what the finished puzzle would look like.

With my glass scraps, the “picture on the box” may not even exist yet, and yet the puzzle pieces do. Sometimes a small glass scrap may be just what I need to fit into a particular design I’ve drawn up, but sometimes my design evolves from the particular scraps on hand.

So maybe what I treasure most is the creative process and the potential of the raw materials. I wonder… is it cheating to make the puzzle fit your pieces instead of having the pieces fit the puzzle?

Photo 101, Day Sixteen: Treasure + Close-up