I spent some happy hours in Newcastle City Library looking at heraldic designs for the medieval craft fair in Leeds.
My sketches (eventually) got translated into designs in stained glass. Each design has a proper heraldic name, eg the Scotland flag is pretty well known as a Saltire and the England flag, of course, is the Cross of St George. Less well-known by name are some of the others. The vertical stripe is called a Pale & the horizontal stripe is a Fess.
All of them were easy-ish to cut out but the simple ones had to be shored up with wire to stop them from flopping and pulling the copper foil away. I learned the hard way that a long, unsupported edge is unstable. That’s why Victorian and Edwardian windows often have a narrow strip of rectangles around the edge – I thought it was simply decorative but it’s more structural.
Solving the problems
Adding the wire was trial-and-error (mostly error!) The best approach seems to be:
- Solder one side or both sides but not the edges.
- Lay the wire as flat as possible along the edges, forming a “bridge” between the pieces that need to be kept from bending.
- Foil the wire along the sides, making a double layer of foil with the wire sandwiched in between.
- Finish soldering
For the Fess (horizontal bar) design, there was also no seam at the top to attach hanging loops. So I solved both problems in one go.
- Solder the inner seams, but not the sides.
- Cut 2 long pieces of wire about 10 cm longer than the length of the outer, vertical side.
- At one end of each wire, wrap the wire around round-nosed pliers to form a hanging loop, leaving a long tail and short tail.
- Lay the long tail along one vertical side, with the loop sitting at the top corner.
- Lay the short tail along the horizontal top to stabilise the loop.
- Apply copper foil along the side, creating a foil “sandwich” with the wire between the original foil and the new foil.
- Repeat for the other side.
- Solder the rest of the piece.
