I finally finished the Queen of the Night panel. If you’re interested in the history of original piece that inspired this, see the Wikipedia article.
This image isn’t great because she’s quite large (A2 sized) and I don’t have any place to hang her up with an attractive background. (Both the upside AND the downside of stained glass is that you can see through it!) The photo was taken in my workshop without back-lighting and you can see the wood panelling through the glass. I have another one backlit through the front window but the patterns on the net curtain are plainly visible – it’s an interesting effect but doesn’t really show the panel at its best.
This piece took many hours to complete, and although I did start with a pattern for the body and an idea for the wings, it was mostly made up as I went along. This added to the time for making her – it’s much easier if the pattern is fully in place before you start! Along the way, I developed a technique for cutting the shapes in situ,, described below. While this took longer, it did allow me to incorporate some ‘archaeological glass’ — two interesting and unusual pieces that I excavated from the soil when the new workshop was being installed. The first piece was very, very thick in shades of blue with a random, vaguely-diamond-shaped texture. The other piece was a rich yellow, with overlapping raised circles and also quite thick in places. It was diabolical to foil them, but they matched beautifully with the colour scheme. I didn’t really want to cut these two pieces mainly because they were so oddly thick-and-thin because of the patter, but also because I didn’t want to take a chance on breaking them or making these unique pieces unusable. However, I did cut smaller, simple shapes from both pieces so that the colours would appear in more than once in the panel. I thought it would be strange to have these big pieces standing alone, without a tie-in to at least one other place. I’m glad I did it, but I was right about the glass being hard to work with. If you click the picture to view the larger version, the smaller of the blue piece is on the left (near the three glass blobs) parallel to her elbow, and on the right side parallel to her hip. The two yellow piece with the circles are to the left of her ankle and to the right of her foot.
The clear, flowery glass for the wings was also very hard to work (it’s easier to see in this photo). It was quite thick and refused to “snap” after scoring. Lots of grinding was needed, and it didn’t help that I was trying to cut around corners half the time. I know better but sometimes I think I’m immune to the rules that govern other people. (My friends will find that sOooOOo hard to believe!) The wings were cut from what I believe is ‘safety glass’ that was left over from a bathroom window project. When we moved into our new house, the shed out back was stacked with lots of clear and patterned glass, some of mechanically cut into small, odd shapes with smooth bevelled edges. It was the presence of all that free glass that got me interested in doing this in the first place – it won’t cost much, I thought, I’ve already got glass. Having just returned from the stained glass shop in town with solder, coloured glass and foil, I can confirm that my initial thoughts were a little bit mistaken. It is not a cheap hobby.
But who knows, maybe I’ll sell a piece someday …?
How to cut pieces without a pattern
- Position a piece of plain, clear glass over the space where the new piece needs to go. It is much easier to see an empty shape through clear glass than through colours.
- Carefully trace the empty space or shape onto the clear glass with a permanent marker pen.
- Overlay the clear glass with the coloured glass, and copy the marker line onto the coloured glass.
- Cut out the glass in the usual way (score along the marker line with the glass cutter and then snap or nibble the excess glass away).
