Second Piece, in which I learn that Soldering Is Hard.

This second piece made me cranky. First off, my cutting skills were still pretty rudimentary (who am I kidding, "were"? Ha!) Cutting angles and even straight lines was something I thought I had to do freehand.

Now, the thing about cutting everything freehand is, it's not very exact. When you don't have exact cuts, your pieces of glass don't fit together properly. The slightest deviation in the first piece throws the second piece slightly out of whack, and so on until you have a piece of stained glass that is not so much square as...blobular.

This is especially so when you're using the copper foil technique. Lead came hides a multitude of sins where inexact cuts are concerned. You don't have that much leeway when you're using copper foil.

Oh, and did I mention? This was my very first experience with the copper foil method, and it is - let me tell you - a lot harder than it looks.

So, with all that said, here it is, in all its uneven, scraggly, blobular glory:

Are the pieces supposed to be all different sizes?

And then, oh lord. The soldering. Can I tell you how danged difficult running a bead of solder smoothly down an uneven seam of copper foil is? My solders were globby, spiky, and altogether crappeh.

As it turns out, none of this mattered, because I ended up breaking the damned thing anyway. Going back in to try and smooth out one of my solder seams, I overheated the central pentagon-shaped amber piece and it cracked. 

I think the death of this piece was a relief for everyone involved.

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