Stained Glass - My Other Passion

As passionate as I am about wood, there is another material that I also love;glass. I have always loved and admired stained glass. It must have all the hours that I spent sitting in a church pew admiring the figures and patterns in the stained glass windows. I was always fascinated by the way the glass would glow and light up when light would shine through a stained glass window. The window would literally come to life which I guess what the intent of the stained glass maker or designer.

However, it never occurred to me to make a stained glass window or that I could even make a stained glass window. That is until we moved into our current home which has two small windows on either side of the fireplace which is now part of our bedroom. The two windows are placed in such a way that they have the early morning sun shining through them.

One day, my wife and I were standing in the room admiring the sunlight streaming through the windows and said that it would be nice if we had stained glass panels in the two windows. I agreed but then asked, "Stained glass is expensive, isn't it?"
"Not if you make it yourself," said my wife.
"You're going to make stained glass windows?", I asked.
"No," she said. "You are."
"Me, I don't know how to make stained glass windows."
" You can learn," said my wife. "There is a stained glass studio not far from here and they have classes in the evening. You can learn there."

That was the beginning of my passion with stained glass.

Here is the first stained glass piece that I ever made. It is an angel that I made during the course that I took in stained glass. The angel was fairly basic. It measured about 6 inches by 6 inches.

Here is the second project that I did, two stained glass windows that now hang in the windows beside the fireplace in our bedroom. each window measures approximately 2 feet by 2 feet. I guess you can say that I took a leap of faith and plunged right into stained glass. The fleurs-de-lis is the center piece of the window. I surrounded the the fleurs-de-lis with clear float glass that was reclaimed from a greenhouse that was replacing its old glass.  The float glass is surrounded by red glass with white squares in the corners.

There is a huge difference between making a small angel and designing and creating a window that measure two feet by two feet. I learned a lot from that project and I realized that I really like the process of making things out of glass.