Day 3

We met a fabulous lady named Brenda (through a lab in our class) who has done quite a bit of stained glass. I got her contact info and arranged for a time to visit her studio. So Monday after class Hilary and I caught a bus, got slightly nervous about our directions, and eventually wound up entering a stained-glass dabbler's heaven. Brenda has piles and piles of stained glass in various colours and textures, glass cutters, a grid type surface on which to do said cutting, drafting paper, lead cames, a soldering iron, and a very charming and talkative cat.

She invited us in to make use of whatever we wanted, taught us the basics of cutting glass, and set us free to practice. After a little bit she suggested that we make a practice window, helped us choose a design, and set us free once more. Here's the design we chose:

(and some glass, and a glass cutter, all on our work surface)

We got to work cutting glass, carefully ligning our cut up against the design, making use of a ruler to keep our lines straight:

(that's me with my mouth hanging open in concentration)

We learned it takes quite a bit of force to snap the glass along the line we'd cut. Maybe there is something to tracing a line with a hot iron and then applying some cold liquid to make the heat differential do the cracking for you like Theophilus suggests. I think Hilary might be leaning that way. Snapping the glass freaked her out a bit:

(That's a candid shot; she's not hamming it up for the camera.)

Around this time, Brenda came in and offered us the use of this space for our entire project. Needless to say, we were (and still are) absolutely thrilled. We'll definitely have to come up with a way to thank her properly. Especially since it looks like this will be a bit more time consuming than we'd hoped. The Wheelwright might be fairly simple by Chartres standards, but it's still a complex design. After well over an hour of work (granted, we were learning what we were doing, but we don't have time for too much practice), we had finished cutting the pieces for our practice window:

(compare, if you will, to the wheelwright)

and we began work with the lead cames. We started by stretching them out (by attaching one end with a clamp to the work bench and yanking on the other with a pair of pliers) and then laid them aside while we used a couple strips of wood to create a corner to work in. Once our corner was ready, we slid our glass away a bit, grabbed a lead came with a groove on one side only, and measured and cut our first edge. The measuring and cutting took quite a bit of practice. We had to be sure to use the correct side of the pliers so we'd get a square edge. Once that was done, Brenda showed us how to wiggle the glass into place and how to measure and cut and fit the cames with grooves on both sides into the in-between parts. I did most of the cutting, and Hilary did most of the placements. Whenever we finished a section, we'd wedge it in with nails so it couldn't move on us while we worked on the next section:

(And we didn't hammer our fingers once! Or cut ourselves, for that matter.)

We continued on on this manner until we had outlined the whole thing in lead cames. (As a side note, we were warned not to eat anything or to get the lead near our eyes. Apparently those are pretty much the only ways to get lead poisoning; we shouldn't absorb it through our fingers or anything.) Brenda then showed us how to cut bits of lead came to fill in the odd places where our measuring and cutting hadn't worked out quite perfectly. Supper time was creeping up when we finished this step, so we decided to leave our window wedged in that way for the nonce:

(Note all the little bits of lead came that we had to clip off. Also, isn't our window pretty?)

We'll be heading back tomorrow to do the actual soldering on both sides of our window. I for one can't wait. We'll also hopefully begin cutting some pieces for our Wheelwright window. Should be fun!