stained glass

Yesterday was a rough one for me. For those who keep up to date here (there are a few of you and I really appreciate it), you know why.

But today was a new day and, in a weird way, I figured I owed it to my buddy Chopper to get this place one step closer to completion. After all, this was his home too. So I returned (again) to the stained glass. While I have five stained glass projects ahead of me, at least the design of ONE of them is finally locked in. What did that take me? Sixteen months? I can't wait to post about the completion of this project, presuming blogs are still around in 2015.

A lot of the credit for settling on the design goes to the folks on Old House Web forums and to a couple of people on the forum at Brownstoner.com. I was reaching the point of cognitive overload, scratching my head about whether stained glass even worked for that cabinet. I was getting ready to slap a couple of sheets of plywood in those doors until one of the OHW users, probably tired of reading my bellyaching about it, took one of the designs and 'shopped it into a photo of that cabinet.

The saga continues on the stained glass design for the master bedroom bureau. I created two more designs (below) that look nice but seem inappropriate for this piece.

I'm beginning to think that stained glass in general is too heavy for this cabinet. I considered using cane instead except my cat would make short work of that. Trixie hops up on the window sill, opens the sock drawer and sleeps in there. Giving her a climbing wall would be a mistake.

Then I remembered something I've seen in old movies: wire glass. You see it a lot in Hollywood set depictions of judge's offices. It's like chicken wire safety glass except the wire is more decorative and usually made of brass. I've never actually seen this stuff in real life so I don't know if it's an actual product or something you sandwich between two panes of glass. All I know is that I spent a fruitless afternoon Googling for it. If you ever need to know about glass coat hangers or glass-impregnated wire, ask me.

Does anyone know what this stuff is called and, better, where I can find it?

Let's see. I finished painting the back wall, the tomatoes are flourishing, I lost 20 pounds... I've managed to exhaust all my excuses for not starting another project. Rather, I'm returning to a project I said I was going to have done by now.

This marathon stained glass project breaks down to six sub-projects, or milestones in TechnoSpeak:

1. Two door panels for the master BR bureau.
2. Two window panels for the master BR hallway window.
3. Two upper door panels for the LR home entertainment unit.
4. Skylight over the staircase.
5. Bathroom skylight.
6. Three sealed light boxes for the back yard fence.

                           
Up first, are the bureau panels. I'm not sure if I ever posted a pic of the completed bureau but that was another tail dragger. I think the finished doors sat against the wall for six months before I hung them. Yes, another fine example of HSC: Home Stretch Complacency.

Anyway, here it is, with my large cache of Nantucket and motorcycle teeshirts. Each stained glass panel is 11"x31". And here's what they'll look like, as designed in GlassEye 2000.

GlassEye is an amazing piece of software. I'm totally (like totally) sold on it. But one of the things it doesn't do is impart judgment on the part of the operator. My concern with this design is that it might be a little too detailed for such a relatively small area. This will be a lead came, not copper foil, job so at the very least I'm probably going to need to use a maximum of 3/16" face came. I hope Albert Stained Glass carries it. Shipping lead tends to get expensive.

Some of the cuts are way too tricky for a wheel glass cutter, even with a grinder. So I did what I always do to kick myself out of an HSC stupor. I bought a new tool.

It's a glass bandsaw, a Gryphon Omni-2 diamond wire saw. I've been wanting a glass bandsaw for a while, ever since I had to cut twelve small circles for another project. I spent an entire evening with a glass grinder doing those. YGlass.com had it on sale with a coupon for three replacement diamond blades so I bit.

The next step is acquiring the materials. Albert has a pretty decent stock of art glass on hand so I'm hoping I can find something to approximate these colors and textures. GlassEye has a large database of commercially available glass but I doubt that any local vendor carries more than a tiny subset of it.

Talk about it the Stained Glass Forum.

Rembrandt, I ain't. I can visualize things pretty well but there's a bridge out somewhere between my left and right brain. With woodworking, I usually wind up head jamming the fabrication. It works 90% of the time. The other 10% is handled by my hard-won skills in making dumb mistakes look like I meant to do that. But this ad hoc process doesn't work for stained glass construction, where you need to have a completed design and pieces cut before you start soldering things together.

I have several stained glass tasks in the queue here. Some, like the upper cabinet doors in the living room media cabinet, have been on hold since 2003. Others, like the funky stairway skylight, I've wanted to replace since the day I first saw the place.

While stained glass construction is fairly mechanical and basically just woodworking joinery using glass and lead came, the design, templating and piecing out can be very time consuming. Most of the glass I've done here is fairly simple and angular to match the existing stained glass. But I wanted something a bit more ornamental for these new projects.

The delay is mostly because I suck at drawing. I can muddle my way through Photoshop if I have to and I've even built a few nice web page banners using "creative appropriation" of assets conceived by others. Change a few lines, overlay a mask or two, morph a few elements and, poof, it's mine. Derivative art.