Adventures at Home and Abroad

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I decided that my mostly Irish husband needed a Celtic knot for his window, so I found a fairly simple pattern. I'm very happy with the colors.

Making Christmas ornaments seemed like a great idea at the time. Easy small gifts, not too time-consuming, colorful. And, if recipients hated them, they could re-gift or conveniently lose them. What I learned: making small things drives me crazy. These little things are FUSSY to make, and they take much longer than one would presume. I like how most of them turned out, however...ornaments are no longer on my list of things to do!

Piet Mondrian, re-imagined. The original: In progress... The final product. I used decorative soldering to give the flower's center some texture and color.

Well, I learned something new with this last project: creating an abstract piece is a thousand times harder than following a realistic pattern. I wanted to follow-up my lead came class with an actual project, completed on my own. As ever, I have bins of scrap glass, so I decided to create a piece where I could accomplish two goals: 1) use the lead came method; and 2) use up scrap glass! It sounded rather easy...sort of like putting a puzzle together. The truth is, it was incredibly hard. Balancing colors and pieces of glass into a unified design almost drove me crazy. At first, I thought I could piece things together without a pattern, but that process was a giant failure. So, I forced myself to draw a pattern that I could revise, revise, and revise again. I'm really happy with how it turned out, despite all of my whining...

I took a class at D&L last month and learned how to make leaded stained glass. In other words, use lead came to assemble the pieces instead of copper foil. The lead came method is a thousand years old and is used by artisans worldwide. But, as one might expect, working with lead does present some health hazards, so it is a bit more persnickety than the copper foil method, which is what I learned several years ago. (Most new beginners in stained glass learn the copper foil method.) The only thing I don't like about the lead came method is stretching the lead itself...I still don't have the hang of it. But I did love using the lead to piece everything together. For some reason, the process was more meditative than copper foil. Then, the mudding process (the "glue" that holds the piece together) is messy, but it works. For some reason, the whole process feels more organic. Also, you don't have to solder as much, which makes me happy. I'm not usually a per...