Finally, the lamp project that would never end, is done. Bought a lamp base and brass top. Then tidied up the seams and applied a copper patina to the seams and the brass top.
I’m surprisingly pleased with the finished piece. This project took so long that I got fed up with it & put it away in disgust for well more than a year. We’ve had a lot of work done on the house lately and found myself with a newly-decorated little room that really wouldn’t be right without a stained glass lamp, so I brought the pieces out of retirement.
I have learned from this that:
- you should never put a piece away without cleaning it, because the flux and crud causes the solder to oxidise
- once the solder has oxidised, it becomes very difficult to rework. I thought my soldering iron had died because the old solder simply wouldn’t melt. Eventually it did, but it took ages, much longer than it should have
- you can’t apply patina to brass — had to ‘tin’ the brass top first, i.e., apply a thin layer of solder over the brass because the patina didn’t take until I did that
- my soldering is shocking – it’s full of holes and lumps, but fortunately as an ‘art noveau’ piece, an “organic look” is OK. It kind of looks like woody stems. If it were art deco, it wouldn’t look right at all, so I’m saved once again by my favourite goddess, Serendipity
I hadn’t intended to apply a patina to it at all, but the base is quite dark and antique-looking, and it didn’t look right with shiny silver seams, plus the brass top looked too new and out of place. The patina pulled the piece together.
I don’t even want to consider how much this lamp cost to make. Materials roughly £120 – (the base alone was £68). Although it’s true that I used some offcuts and still have quite a lot of opaque glass left. But the hours in it – I don’t even want to think about it. Never again, my Tiffany days are done! But having said that, I surely must have spent as many hours, or more, on the Queen of the Night and never got tired of it. I don’t know what it was about the lamp that got me so fed up, but I sincerely hated it for a long time. Never mind, it’s done now.
