And here are the pictures Hilary promised. My commentary is going to be fairly brief because I have another set of stuff to talk about in antoher entry (which shall remain mysterious for the moment, never mind that it will be posted above this one...) So, here we go, picture first, then comments:
As Hilary said, Brenda was amazing and made us a second stained glass window to practice on. You can see it above, along with my hand applying flux (that's the bottle of flux in the bottom left of the picture) in preparation for soldering.
And here's a picture of the window after I learned how to solder on it. Needless to say, I'm not gifted in this domain. It's a very good thing that's the
back of the window.
Meanwhile, Hilary was working away at cutting background pieces for our big window. You can see the pattern on our work surface. She definitely got the hang of cutting this session.
See, there she is using grozing (spelling?) pliers to snap the glass without so much as flinching!
And a closeup of how the pliers are helpful for getting little rounded edges out that are hard to grip with our fingers. The numbers you see on the pattern are also written on our pieces of glass in wet-erase marker so that we don't get them all mixed up.
Now Hilary has begun soldering. We're trying to do it a bit like they did in the Middle Ages. Instead of putting the solder metal down on the lead came and then applying the soldering iron to melt it, we're melting the metal on the iron and then applying it to the correct spot.
There's Hilary doing the applying to the correct spot thing now.
As you can see, she's much better at the soldering than I am. Look at those tidy little dots.
Here I am working on one of the pieces with the curves and wonky angles that Hilary mentioned. It's the upper part of the wheelwright's robe/outfit. I broke it the first time we tried, but eventually we got it with a mix of cutting and grozing pliers. My fingers were pretty tired out by the end of the day.
Here's our pattern with the pieces we managed to cut. Not a bad start, if you ask me.
And here's a picture of Hilary and me with our benefactress/mentor/all-around-awesome-person Brenda. Hilary and Brenda are holding up our practice windows, which Brenda was sweet enough to allow us to keep. We'll be back at it on Monday, so you can look forward to more glass-cutting and -caming and -soldering adventures soon.
As Hilary said, Brenda was amazing and made us a second stained glass window to practice on. You can see it above, along with my hand applying flux (that's the bottle of flux in the bottom left of the picture) in preparation for soldering.
And here's a picture of the window after I learned how to solder on it. Needless to say, I'm not gifted in this domain. It's a very good thing that's the back of the window.
Meanwhile, Hilary was working away at cutting background pieces for our big window. You can see the pattern on our work surface. She definitely got the hang of cutting this session.
See, there she is using grozing (spelling?) pliers to snap the glass without so much as flinching!
And a closeup of how the pliers are helpful for getting little rounded edges out that are hard to grip with our fingers. The numbers you see on the pattern are also written on our pieces of glass in wet-erase marker so that we don't get them all mixed up.
Now Hilary has begun soldering. We're trying to do it a bit like they did in the Middle Ages. Instead of putting the solder metal down on the lead came and then applying the soldering iron to melt it, we're melting the metal on the iron and then applying it to the correct spot.
There's Hilary doing the applying to the correct spot thing now.
As you can see, she's much better at the soldering than I am. Look at those tidy little dots.
Here I am working on one of the pieces with the curves and wonky angles that Hilary mentioned. It's the upper part of the wheelwright's robe/outfit. I broke it the first time we tried, but eventually we got it with a mix of cutting and grozing pliers. My fingers were pretty tired out by the end of the day.
Here's our pattern with the pieces we managed to cut. Not a bad start, if you ask me.
And here's a picture of Hilary and me with our benefactress/mentor/all-around-awesome-person Brenda. Hilary and Brenda are holding up our practice windows, which Brenda was sweet enough to allow us to keep. We'll be back at it on Monday, so you can look forward to more glass-cutting and -caming and -soldering adventures soon.
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