My First Attempt at Stained Glass

They say that life imitates art (or is it the other way around?). In my case, my art imitates my life in that I am interested in a lot of different media. Last week, I made my first stained glass piece. I took a fused glass class a while back and loved it but at this stage of the game I'm not ready to invest in a big expensive kiln so I thought stained glass would be a fun thing to try.

My mom Linda was an accomplished craft artist and also was interested in working in a variety of media. At one point she was thinking about trying stained glass and bought some of the necessary materials. She also had some beautiful green blue glass that was reclaimed from a broken window at the church across from our house on 8^th Court. I'm not sure if she ever did any stained glass pieces but she inspired me to try it. Further inspiration came from a huge box of glass remnants that a friend bought for me at a yard sale for $1. Those remnants are what I used to make this abstract piece.

With every new medium I try there is lots of jargon to learn: came, fids, flux, oh my! I checked out several books the library and the first thing I found out that there are two ways to make stained glass: the lead came method, and the copper foil method. I opted for copper foil because it seemed a bit more flexible. Copper foil involves covering the edges of the glass with adhesive-backed copper foil tape and soldering the pieces together. Lead came is done by soldering strips of leading, "came," between the pieces of glass.

Two books that were really helpful to my learning process were Stained Glass in an Afternoon by Vicki Payne and Stained Glass for the First Time from Sterling Publishing. Even more helpful was the Expert Village series How to Make Art Out of Stained Glass that I found on YouTube. YouTube has videos on just about any art form (or anything else) you want to learn about. And I thought it was just videos of people doing stupid things or being kicked in the crotch!

As you see, my first piece is kind of wonky but I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. Stained glass is definitely something you learn by doing. I have lots of scraps to work with so I can hone my technique. Once I'm more comfortable with it, I want to make a piece using Mom's beautiful green/blue church glass.