DURHAM - Paula MacLeod has the seven-year itch. After making mosaics full time since 2000, she's stepping her art up a notch. Although MacLeod, 40, is happy to teach folks how to adorn a flower pot or a mirror with broken glass and dishes, she's also exploring her own form of painting, with impressive results. Her supplies are not paints and brushes, but tile and glass, hammers and pliers.

FROM FUN TO FINE: Years of mosaics, including a bar top and a tabletop, grace MacLeod's home in south Durham, both inside and out. In her studio, where she hangs recent work, MacLeod pointed out a framed wall hanging of Billie Holiday. "I had this at the Cool Jazz Festival in Hillsborough and several people asked me when did I paint the glass, before or after I cut it," she said with a laugh. "That really surprised me." In fact, the tones are created with many small pieces of smalti, the opaque glass used in classical Byzantine mosaics. "I guess the biggest challenge trying to work in mosaic as a fine artist is to educate people on why I'd want to do a mosaic and not paint it." So why would she? "Because you can see a different image in glass based on the light in the day. It's almost like it's several paintings."

COMMERCE AND ART: MacLeod, who lived in Hendersonville and Goldsboro growing up, is a natural artist. Ultimately, though, practicalities won out at East Carolina. "I guess life makes you pick a sane choice. In college, I was a single parent, so I did what was going to pay the bills. I went into technical writing. But I managed to get in an art class here and there." It was a job at Nortel Networks that brought her to Durham in 1990. "When I moved here I started taking classes at the Durham Arts Council. I took basic drawing, a whole year of figure drawing, a painting studio. I saw that a woman was teaching a class in making mosaic stepping stones and I thought that would be fun."

HER STEPPING STONE: "I took the course in 1997 and I thought 'Wow, this is fabulous!' " MacLeod recalled, her face animated at the memory. "I bought a book and started doing it more, taking the concept of painting and drawing and putting it in tile. I found that I really loved the fact that it's dimensional. I can take tile and juxtapose it with glass, or put matte next to shiny, or something flat next to something recessed." Her teacher, Chapel Hill artist Martha Petty, became a mentor. MacLeod was awarded an Emerging Artist Grant from the Durham Arts Council in 2000 and used the money for tools. "It was a big, big pat on the back."

MAKING THE LEAP: Growing dissatisfaction with her job at Nortel pushed MacLeod to make the switch from mosaic hobbyist to full-time artist in 2000. By then she was married, to software engineer Rodney Scurlock, and had a second son, now 12. Since then she has taken a couple of professional mosaic workshops out of state and hopes to take a third in Italy. Her work has been in more than two dozen exhibits and she was chosen to demonstrate the mosaic technique on HGTV "Crafter's Coast to Coast." The segment debuted in June 2005 and continues to air. Although she stills uses some broken pottery shards -- her supply area looks like the back room of an antique china shop -- MacLeod prefers the costlier smalti for its quality, tones and versatility.

WALL FLOWERING: MacLeod continues to make some small pieces, but focuses on wall hangings. She bought a small electric kiln for fusing her own glass. She also does several commissions are year. Her most recent were a "Goodnight Moon"-inspired bookcase and a 6-by-4-foot wall hanging for New Hope Church in Durham, taking pottery shards used in a therapeutic workshop called Sounds of Surrender. "They wrote all over cups of things to let go of and then broke them. They're still working on hanging it because it weighs about 70 pounds."

ALWAYS TEACHING: MacLeod teaches adults privately and at the Durham Arts Council, and children at Artspace in Raleigh. "I like teaching," she said. "I find it really exciting when somebody's catching on and they're doing cool stuff. And I have a really good time with the kids." With her older son, 21, moving out of the house recently, she was able to double her studio space, in the family's finished basement, and so is stepping up her private and small-group lessons.

ELVES AT WORK: The "Grout Elf" is MacLeod's invention born of necessity, a tool that applies grout and cleans a surface in one step. Many mosaic artists use their hands, but hers had become sensitive to the properties in grout. She developed a small, flexible "grout float" and sells it for $11.99 through a mosaic supply Web site. "Getting something manufactured, that's a whole new can of worms," she said.

GATHERING ENERGY: Much of one studio wall is sprinkled with pieces in her "Meditation" series, based on connected energy, many of which have already sold. "As we meditate we soften and fade, moving from ego to clarity, and linking individuals in the process of letting go," said MacLeod, who follows the practice. Some of the works have an ethereal quality to them. She often puts a piece of fused glass in the middle to represent collective energy. One piece, called "Vertigo," reflects her own recent struggle with vertigo, which she said have improved but not disappeared. On the lighter side of things, she makes hanging disco balls out of CDs. "I'd been wanting to do something with CDs that got scratched. People put them in trees, and that's fine, but I was thinking what else I could do."

DO IT YOURSELF: When asked if mosaic work is something people think they can easily do on their own, MacLeod said with a big laugh, "I hear it all time. One woman told me, 'I'm a mosaic artist, too.' Then she asked, "what's the stuff in between the pieces?' 'You mean the grout?' I said. She must not be doing it right. But I know that a lot of things can look easy. Abstract art looks easy, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't do it."

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