Stained glass 02: Cutting out the Queen of the Night

The Queen of the Night’s body cut out in a watery red-orange glass. Up to this point, I’m mostly following the pattern made on the computer. I had to make a new pattern for the hair, which was too dark on the pattern against the blue background to see clearly.

I used a light box to make the pattern for the head. It had to be done in reverse because of the ripples on the “front” side of the glass make the glass to0 difficult to cut. Glass comes in many textures and some of the more beautiful pieces have things (flowers, confetti, other bits of coloured glass etc.) embedded. Sometimes it doesn’t have a definite front or back, but in this case there is an undulating pattern on one side with the other side perfectly flat and smooth which is always easier to work with.

So, I flipped the face, arms, neck and necklace pieces over and slid a blank piece of paper underneath. Holding them carefully in place with one hand, I first drew an outline around the face piece, then drew the hair in freehand, simplifying the silhouette — the original pattern I made on the computer had curves too severe to cut without a lot of grief (and wastage).

The wings were a different matter. The feather pieces for the top half of the left side were pretty much cut free-hand. I placed them over the pattern and roughly registered where the elbow would meet, simplified the pieces in my head and then started cutting out the feathers from clear, flower-patterned glass. I did trace out the curve of her body for the feather piece closest to her body.

The clear, flower-textured glass of the wings is from my seemingly-endless supply that came with our new house. It’s bathroom window glass, designed to be translucent but difficult to see through properly for the sake of privacy. The glass is somewhat problematic to work with. It’s easy enough to score (the pattern is deep inside the glass and doesn’t cause the cutter to ripple or swerve as other textured glass can do) but it’s quite tough to break – it’s fairly thick. The best result, as Caroline our tutor says, is when the glass will “snap like a biscuit” (i.e., a crisp cookie) after it’s scored. But this glass rarely does that. I always have to tap with the other end of the cutter underneath the score line to get a crack to appear. Then it will suddenly break or crumble. When you have to tap to get a crack, the break is often less smooth and that leads to wobbly copper foil lines later on. So, even though this glass costs me nothing, and it’s pretty, I would still rather not work with it again for awhile.