Stained Glass, Exhibit A

In case you're not an avid reader of my one post a month, I've just started taking a stained glass class.  It's at Holdman Studios, an art center at Thanksgiving Point run by my sort-of/obscurely related through marriage/twice removed not-quite-a-relative Tommy Holdman, a super talented local stained glass artist.   Last night was my first glass, uh, class.  Here's how it went down...


Step 1) Choose a design.  I'm not into those flowery Victorian designs, which were most plentiful in the stack of options.  I'm more into the clean lines of the Arts and Crafts movement.  This was the closest design they offered us novices:


Step 2) Number all the pieces on your design on the giant light table.  Giant light tables = cool.


Step 3) Choose your glass.  This was the hardest part.  It's really the only creative part of the process.  Well, so far.  It's the most important because you could finish and decide your window looks stupid.  What would you do then?  Smash it and start over, of course.  So choosing my glass was stressful.  Also because you have to handle glass.  Glass, in case you don't know, is sharp.  You shouldn't, say, reach into a bin of glass scraps to see what's at the bottom without using the rubber-coated safety gloves the teacher instructed you not to forget to wear.  But hey, glass cuts are clean cuts, right?  So they should heal up fine.  In the end I decided to go with colors that would match my eat-in kitchen, where I'm most likely to hang my window.  My kitchen is a robin's egg blue and red and white.  So here are the glass pieces I chose:

(That dark one is actually a bright red. It just looks black.)

Step 4) Trace your design onto really hard-to-cut paper.

Step 5) Give yourself a hand-cramp cutting out all the pieces of your design from said paper.  You have to cut on either side of your pencil mark, making each puzzle piece slightly smaller than your paper design.  It's a LOT of cutting.  I needed a Coke something awful half-way through.  But the cramps helped stopped the bleeding, which is a good thing, right?



That's as far as I got last night.  Next week I think we will get the chance to seriously slice ourselves as we cut the glass.  Stay tuned!