Photographic Evidence of our Second Invasion

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.

A second invasion!

We stormed Castle Brenda again this afternoon, to try our hands at soldering and to start cutting out our Wheelwright. We arrived to find that Brenda had been inspired by our interest in glass work and had kindly decided to make another little window for us to solder so we could each have one to practice on and take home! (She really is the best!)

It turns out that although I am a bit of a wuss when it comes to cutting glass I can solder decently (for a first-timer) and a little more practice makes the glass cutting a less terrifying. Once we had our pretty practice windows done we decided it was time to graduate from straight lines to the big leagues. Curves and weird angles, oh my!

I would like to say at this point: Glass working is hard, time consuming work! And that's for us, using modern tools.

Brenda also let us know of a glass work studio downtown that has a kiln available so we are hoping to be able to paint a few pieces of our window. The face, hands, and upper robe are the pieces we most need to have painted as they will look quite plain and silly without the paint. If we have time we would like to paint the lower robe and the legs as well. It is unlikely that we will be able to use Theophilus' paint recipe as it involves pounding and burning copper. He calls for the combining of equal parts copper powder, "byzantine blue" glass powder, green glass powder, and a little wine or urine to make a paint. We feel that our time constraints justify our using modern paint.  

Jessica has custody of the photos from today so I expect she will be posting the best ones - and her thoughts on the day - sometime soon.

A note for day 3

It seems that inserting pictures wreaks havoc with blogger's ability to maintain spacing in posts. If anyone has any suggestions for how to fix that, I would really appreciate it. Otherwise, I hope the lack of spacing doesn't make comprehension too difficult.

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!

Day 2

I stopped by the glass studio near my house to inquire about pricing of materials and came home with a sizable bundle of lead came "scrap" which honestly looked more like 2'-3' lengths to me. I also took home two 1'x1' pieces of glass in blue and amber, and some "scrap" glass in red and green. The whole hoard was generously given to us for a very small fee by the lovely gents at Victorian Art Glass.

In my opinion an overall successful mission.

Day 1

Today we discussed sourcing materials for our project, and how ambitious we would like to be.

We chose to design our panel based on window 64 of the Chartres Cathedral which depicts the story of Noah. The Cathedral, dedicated in 1260, is a beautiful example of the scale and richness of medieval stained glass. We have selected a small portion of that massive work, a Wheelwright, representing the Guild of Wheelwrights who funded the construction of window 64 in concert with the Coopers and Carpenters.

We are limiting ourselves to construction of the piece, considering glass making and lead came producing to be unnecessarily early steps for the purpose of our project.

We are planning to source material from local glass art studios, but are also scrounging material from an uncle. We have learned already that glass colours at the time were limited to a deep blue, green, saffron, red, purple, and neutral.

Personally I am hoping that we can find a kiln so that we can actually paint and fire a piece or two of glass to go into the larger whole. These painted pieces would most likely be the face and dress of the wheelwright. Unfortunately kiln time may be out of our reach, but here's hoping!