This project has been on-going for quite awhile. Last week I took three days off work to attend a stained glass “summer school” to finish it. Day 1, I was confidently predicting cutting everything out, day 2 would be for foiling, and day 3, soldering et voila, all done. (Yeah, right!)
On the bright side, I have finished cutting out all six panels. The last three haven’t got a fancy pattern, although you can see from the first picture that there are sinuous lines that will visually carry through from the intricate panels.
It’s also interesting to note how much lighter the glass appears to be on the intermediate panels. It’s not actually true – held up to the light the beigeyness is pretty similar. (The glass is called “pink champagne” which was a surprise to me. I’m a bit of a connoisseur of pink — stop laughing, Diane! — and as pink goes, this one doesn’t). I think the strong difference in tone is a combination of the opacity of the glass and white paper underlying the table the more intricate panels. I ran out of the background glass and when I ordered more of the same, I specifically asked for it to be as opaque as possible.
The flower on its own is a detail of the simplest of the three pattern panels. If you compare this flower to the upside-down yellow flower (and the big butterfly) on the original design, you can see how much simplification of a design is needed to do it in glass. I completely abandoned the lily-like flowers, reduced the butterfly to a “mere” 10 pieces, and realised pretty early on that those gracefully thin and elegant green stems are not really doable in a single piece. If nothing else, I’ve learned to appreciate segmented stems, whether the original plant has them or not!
The final image is a detail of the big butterfly, showing how the antennae will be implied by the way the background pieces were cut. The black electrician’s tape is just there to hold the pieces in place for carrying them home. You can also still see the correction fluid that I used to draw the butterfly pattern on the glass.
I also managed to scrounge all the tiny red pieces out of the off-cuts bin – each flower has a different shade of red in the middle section (although they are the same for each individual flower — I’m frugal, not crazy.)
