A Bunch More Pieces, Merry Christmas!

Hi there, sorry I haven't posted in so long. I've been working hard on lots of glass pieces though, most of which I gave to people for Christmas presents. Here they are:

My Third Piece
The pictured piece is actually my second attempt at making this design. The first attempt came out so badly that I decided to chuck the whole thing and re-do it. In my first attempt, the circular bit was so out of kilter that it just killed the whole thing with its wrongness. Cutting circles freehand is hard!

I got the basic idea for this design while watching a documentary on TV about (of all things) the Kinsey sex researchers. One of the people being interviewed was sitting in front of a pair of stained glass doors that had a design similar to this one, and I re-created a tweaked version of the pattern in Adobe Illustrator to try for myself. I used 1/4 inch rounded lead came. The finished piece was about 28" x 18".

As you can see, the lines still aren't completely straight. Even using a cutting square, my cuts are still not coming out as even and consistent as I'd like.

My husband The Scotsman built a beautiful mahogany frame for the piece, and it made a huge difference in how finished it looked. He used miter joints in the corners, which came out looking fantastic. I gave this piece to my Mom and we hung it horizontally because it fit the window space better.

My Fourth Piece

Next up is the piece I gave to The Scotsman's Mum for Christmas. This was one of my own designs. For this one I used the copper foil technique, and I'm glad to say my soldering skills are getting a lot better. I found that I was having a much easier time and was a lot more confident running the lead bead along the copper foil. Unfortunately, as you can see, my straight edges are still not very straight!

My Fifth Piece
This is another of my own designs. I gave this one to my sister. Still with the problematic non-straight edges!

Sixth Piece
This one was an adaptation of a free pattern I found on the interwebs. I gave it to some family friends.

I made one last Christmas present piece, but unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of it before I gave it away. Curses!

In other news, for Christmas my darling husband gave me a Cutter's Mate, a Circle Pro, and a Beetle Bits cutting system.

Here are the Cutter's Mate and Circle Pro in action:

I am so excited to start using these tools! I think they will help me take my cutting skills to a whole new level.

I hope everyone had a lovely holiday season! Here's to a fantastic New Year.

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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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First post, first piece

There are things to be said for being married to the Best Husband in the World. Here's an example: last year we were watching Mastercrafts, and they were showing three people learning how to do stained glass. I made an off-hand comment that I'd always wanted to learn how to do stained glass, and promptly forgot that I'd ever told him that.


But did Best Husband in the World forget it? No! He squirrelled that comment away in his brain, and a few months later, sprung it on me that my birthday present was two one-on-one classes with a stained glass professional!

See what I mean?

Anyway, I took to stained glass immediately. Despite the aching back you get from standing bent over a cutting table for hours on end and the innumerable cuts, burns and other indignities your hands suffer when you work with glass, I loved it.

I'm starting this blog to chart my progress with stained glass. Here's the first piece I ever made. I drew the design freehand and it took me two sessions of about 5 hours each to cut, lead and finish the piece.

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