Getting started in stained glass.

Elvenshae · September 2016

So, the art forum looks more focused around painting and drawing, etc., so I thought to drop this one here. If that's wrong, I can go there, instead.

Stained glass.

I've always loved it, and my great uncle and great aunt used to have a stained glass studio before he died of cancer; they let me play around with the tools occasionally, but that was 20 years ago. I want to pick up a hobby that isn't computer games because I need some diversity in my life, and I have a really awesome workbench in my garage that's kinda going unused a lot. I've always been way better at technical drawing than freehand. I want to make something that I can give to someone else.

I think I'd like to start making stained glass things.

Has anyone here found a good guide to jumping into it? Any advanced glaziers have good tips for a newbie? Is there a reliable "your first glass shopping list"?

RandomEncounter · September 2016

My wife does fused glass and occasionally dabbles in stained. I'll see if she has any resources she uses. I thiiiink she gets most of her stuff from http://www.dickblick.com/, but I could be wrong

Elvenshae · September 2016

@RandomEncounter

Any chance your wife had any suggestions?

RandomEncounter · October 2016

She says that she gets her stuff through Delphi, anythingstainedglass, or stained glass express. There is a YouTube guy she likes to watch that has really good tutorials, but she can't remember the name if it

Elvenshae · October 2016

@RandomEncounter

Tell her I said thanks!

EDIT: Anything Stained Glass is pretty local; ROAD TRIP!

Kakodaimonos · October 2016

My mother does a lot of stained glass, from small boxes up to full Tiffany style lamps. And I've done smaller projects. But I haven't done any in a few years due to space and time issues.

I'd recommend looking around for a beginner's class that has you doing a small project and supplies the tools. It's a decent amount of money to get all of the equipment and get it set up. Definitely try it out first.

Even a basic kit is going to run you about $150 - $200. And that won't include glass or solder.

You'll also need a workspace that's well ventilated and get a fume extractor. You use lead solder with stained glass and you don't want to breathe in lead fumes.

mts · October 2016

Pff it's stained glass tradition to get mercury poisoning. That's how the great masters did

RandomEncounter · October 2016

Just from my backseat participation, it seems like getting the cuts right is the trickiest thing. So maybe practice on some cheap sheet glass before using any expensive materials

Elvenshae · June 2017

Well, I did it!

Signed up for a beginner class and, over the course of two days, made my first thing.

First, we made some practice cuts on some cheapish yellow glass just to practice.

I was pretty proud of my waves / hills / curves there.

Then it was time to make something real.

The Pattern:

Initial pieces all cut-out - we glued the paper pattern to the glass with a glue stick, which was a really clever idea. You can see where I messed up some of the cuts a bit and they didn't fit quite so well together.

Then we ground the glass down to the pattern, which allowed them to fit quite a bit more closely together.

After that, you take the pattern off the glass, clean it up, and put the pieces in a form to get everything squared up. This is where you check to see how closely you can get all the pieces in and identify ones that are still slightly too big. The object is to minimize the amount of additional grinding you have to do by fixing the smallest number of pieces. I had to grind two - the top-right clear piece and the bottom-right water piece. You mark the overlap with a sharpy, and then grind off anything that's colored black.

Then you foil it - wrapping, essentially, copper tape around each piece, trying to make sure you get the same amount on each side of the glass. The solder only sticks to the foil - you can scrape it off the glass with an exacto knife pretty easily.

Then you solder both sides - my soldering iron was a bit defective, and I hadn't really soldered anything in forever (and before that had only done wiring) so my initial soldering was super sloppy. Then the instructors noticed the issue with my iron, got me a new one, and it was pretty smooth sailing after that. All soldered up, and actually looking like a stained glass piece:

After that, you put a zinc frame on it, solder the frame in place, and patina it. I went with a pewter / dark silver patina for the solder, though leaving it naturally silver was an option, too. Add some hanging rings to it, add a suction hook, and ... VOILA!

Holy shit this was fun. I think I may need to do this a lot.

Rend · June 2017

That is all kinds of awesome.

Elvenshae · June 2017

Thanks!

ceres · June 2017

That is amazing and as long as you're willing to post your learning process and give tips with the images, give advice asked for, plan to ask for advice when you need it, and keep it on topic then you can have it here.

Elvenshae · July 2017

ceres wrote: »

That is amazing and as long as you're willing to post your learning process and give tips with the images, give advice asked for, plan to ask for advice when you need it, and keep it on topic then you can have it here.

Thanks!

So, the saga continues! I went ahead and signed up for the Intermediate Stained Glass class at the same place, which is usually a 5-week session but, during the summer, expands to 13 weeks. During the class, you'll pick up the supplies you need to accomplish stained glass on your own as you go. So you start with things like a cork-backed ruler (good for straight cuts; the cork means it doesn't slide on the glass), your cutting tools, and a pattern. Later, you'll pick up your grinder, your soldering iron, foil, etc.

The grinder itself is either pretty cheap or the most expensive piece of the kit. If you get a manual grinding stone, it's relatively inexpensive - like, $10-$20. But then, of course, you need to manually file your glass. If, instead, you get a powered grinder, you're looking at something in the $100-$200 range. While the stone is more traditional, the powered grinder is way faster, so that's what I went with. As Kakodaimonos very aptly pointed out ...

Kakodaimonos wrote: »

Even a basic kit is going to run you about $150 - $200. And that won't include glass or solder.

That's about accurate for the total of the kit so far, excluding the more-expensive grinder I decided to go with.

So, for your intermediate project, you can either bring your own pattern or pick one of the preselected ones - they offer a collection of slightly more advanced patterns to choose from, all of which are about 2x the surface area and 4x the pieces of the beginner stuff. (My sailboat, above, is ~8.5x11 inches with 12 pieces of glass; my new one, a lighthouse on a point of land, is not next to me so I can't measure it but it's something like 12x20 with 40 pieces, including the individually-cut window panes at the top of the lighthouse, which are going to be a challenge to get right.) You'll need two copies of your pattern - one to cut up, and one to serve as the assembly key.

The next step is to pick your glass. Generally, you'll end up with way more glass than you need for the specific project because it's sold in, more or less, 12x12 inch pieces. Depending on the store, they may also have remnants available - pieces left over from classes, or their own work, for those who only need a smaller piece of a particular color or pattern. That being said, chances are good you'll be able to use your glass for your next project, so it's not really wasted - the only parts that are wasted are the pieces you cut away from your pattern that are too small to reuse in something else, and even then, you can do a mosaic piece with them once you've got enough.

There are lots of different types of glass - "water glass" has a pretty ripple pattern to it, others are bumpy, others are pearlescent, etc. The one major thing to look out for is what are termed "art glasses." They are manufactured a little differently than more standard glasses, which results in them being a lot trickier to cut properly (they also tend to be a bit more expensive than the other glass). The instructors recommended staying away from them for the first couple of projects, just to avoid issues with screwing up your cuts and wasting glass (c.f. it costs more), but if you're brave, go forth boldly.

The other one to be careful of is white glass, which has titanium added to make the pretty white color. This also affects the glass's structure such that it is much more likely to break along a line you didn't cut, so the instructors also recommend you be careful of white glass and cut it using more, smaller cuts, especially on curves, instead of trying to get it all in one go as you can pretty easily with other glass. Since I'm making a lighthouse, I decided white glass was the "next level trick" I'd tackle for this piece, and promptly screwed up one of my cuts, "wasting" a small piece of glass. After reapplying the pattern to a different section, however, I was able to get it right the second time, and the broken piece is still big enough to do something else with later, so it's not really wasted, either.

Cutting tools! You need 4:

Foil scissors
Running pliers
Breaker / grozers
Glass cutter

The first one you need to use are foil scissors. Note that they aren't there to cut foil, but to cut out a pattern that allows for the glass to be foiled. Unlike normal scissors, which have two blades, foil scissors have three, which results in them cutting away a thin strip of paper in the middle of your cut. This allows you to cut the glass to the pattern, and then slightly increase the size of each piece by wrapping it in copper foil while still having it all fit together.

Running pliers are great for long cuts in your glass where you've got plenty of material on each side. They're flat-nosed pliers that have a central ridge on one side. When breaking glass with them, you score the top of it with your glass cutter, then place the ridge on the pliers under your score. Squeezing gently on the pliers bends the glass over the ridge, and it separates along the score quite cleanly (if you've done things properly).

Breaker / groziers are for smaller cuts, where the running pliers won't fit or aren't needed. One side - the breaker - is flat, and you use it by grabbing the glass right next to the score (flat-side up) and pulling down and away gently. The other side, the grozier - is curved, and is used to "chew up" the glass when you've left too much on, accidentally, before grinding it.

Lastly, glass cutters are used to score your glass before breaking it (either with a tool, as above, or with your hands). They have a small cutting wheel which needs to be held perpendicularly to the glass's surface. When I first did this, 20+ years ago, the only cutters around were pencil-style, which need to be manually lubricated and come with a handy weight on the back to tap your glass and help break it. This method has fallen out of favor - except for stained glass repair - because it often resulted in chipped glass. Instead, running pliers / breakers are now used, and the cutters are way more fancy, including features like pistol grips for better control and pressure and self-lubrication.

I'll add some pictures later, but that's about where I am right now: cutting out all of the glass to make my piece. I expect to finish all the cutting this week, and then move on to the grinding (!) and the cleaning (!!) and the regrinding (!!!) before getting to the foiling (!!!!).

Elvenshae · July 2017

So, no class on the week of the 4th meant we were back in this week, where I was able to finish up the cutting and begin the grinding process.

It's also where I ended up making a mistake, so here I'll go over the mistake I made, how I could have prevented it, and how I ended up fixing it.

First off, here's everything all cut up to pattern:

You can see that in most cases, the pattern paper is on the "top" of the glass piece, but on others it's missing (the roofs, sun, and paint strips on the lighthouse). That's because those pieces are textured glass - they've got a flat side and a textured side, and the paper patterns only really stick to the flat sides. So, for those pieces, you need to decide which way you want the textured side to face and adjust your pattern accordingly. I decided that I wanted all of the textures "up" for this one.

The next step, after you've got everything cut up, is to take it over to the water bath and the grinder. First, you grind down anything on the glass that isn't covered by the pattern, and then wash off the glue and the pattern. I made it about halfway through before class ended for the evening, so I had some homework to do (with my new grinder!) to prepare for next week's class:

As the patterns came off and the pieces were placed on the reference pattern, my mistake from earlier came to light. I wasn't sure, at first, how bad it was going to be, but it was bad enough that I needed to fix it. So, one of the tricks about cutting glass is that it doesn't like curved cuts, and so you have to be really careful with them and, for "extreme" curves, take them a piece at a time. While cutting the sky-blue piece on the right, I tried to cut a curve all in one go, and it would have worked out, too, except for those meddling kids me doing them in the wrong order.

I was trying to cut, essentially, the red line here:

Notice the little point where the circle, the light blue, and the dark blue come together? That's the part I messed up on - you can see where there's a gap that the sky blue glass doesn't cover. Here's what happened: I attempted to make this cut using two breaks. For the first, I did the "long" one:

... and then I attempted to do the short side:

Unfortunately, I didn't leave enough glass behind, and the glass, instead of breaking along the score I had made, broke at the weak part I'd (inadvertently, on-purpose) made:

What I should have done, instead, is what are called echo cuts. That's where you take several passes, slowly cutting out the curve you want to see. In practice, it would have looked something like:

... leaving me with the shape I wanted. Depending on how things were going, I could even have replaced the last cut with some additional grinding. Anyway, I didn't, and I had a problem - a hole in my pattern where there should have been glass. Smallish holes like this can sometimes be covered by solder, but in my case that would leave a gigantic glop of solder up by the sun, which was less than ideal. I could cut a new piece of the sky blue, but the piece I needed to recut was large enough that I might need to buy another piece, and there'd be some significant waste involved. So, how to fix it?

On my instructor's recommendation, I went ahead and recut the sun - the yellow-orange glass was cheaper than the sky blue but, more importantly, I knew I had a piece big enough to work with. So, I cut a new sun piece a bit larger than the pattern originally called for by tracing the existing sun piece back onto another piece of yellow-orange glass, and then expanding that out by ~1/2 an inch by hand. Once the new sun was cut out, I placed it on top of the pattern, and marked the overhang of the sky pieces beneath it. I trimmed them down - pretty conservatively, because I sure as heck didn't want to have to do all of them again - with the glass cutter and plies / breakers, and then finished off the last couple of millimeters with my grinder. When you're grinding, you mark the part that needs to be ground in (black) Sharpie, and then just grind on the glass until all of the Sharpie is gone. Although this step didn't involve huge changes to the glass, it took quite some time because of the need to not screw it up. Thus, grind a bit, dry the glass off, try to fit it in, mark a little more Sharpie, grind that, dry the glass ... Lather, rinse, repeat about a half-dozen times for each of the glass pieces that needed adjusting (sky-blue top, dark-blue middle, sky-blue top-right).

Finally, it all fit together cleanly, and I'd even regained some of the interesting, pointed shape that the sky-blue piece had in the original pattern.

Which brings us to the end of the work for this week - a completely cut and ground pattern, in the form, ready to be foiled next week:

QuantumTurk · July 2017

My pop has done stained glass either full time or part time for something like 30 years now. I've thrown in a little imgur album so I don't have to worry about image sizes, but here is some of his work! I've gotten to help him with pieces before and even made some for past partners/friends weddings etc. Any ugly solders in the album are probably mine, any bad color choices are due to the client. I've done copper foil all of twice, both times for little trinkets. Screw that stuff, I much prefer working with the lead came. Kudos to your patience to work with it. Also, a word of advice, never accept any pattern that includes grapes. It is NEVER worth making grapes.
Album: http://imgur.com/a/rnse9

Elvenshae · July 2017

@QuantumTurk

That is some really pretty work, there!

Thanks for the advice on grapes - I can immediately imagine why they'd be a huge pain!

So, the lead came stuff - is that for larger pieces, primarily? The shop I'm learning at does mostly the foil and solder stuff.

(Lead came is basically a strip of lead with channels in it that you wrap around the pieces of glass. Then you, I guess, crimp it onto the glass? Sometimes, it's single-sided and others it's double sided. It's the alternative to foiling and soldering.)

QuantumTurk · July 2017

Yea, came is an alternative to the copper foil. So the downside is probably cost and cutting and working with it, but you don't really crimp it, you match the channel to the glass and the width to what you care about. So pop rarely uses a grinder, but he is both good (and uses the grozing pliars to nibble away) and the came just eats mistakes. You can see in the whales, Cardinal and lighthouse places where getting a fine point of glass would be super hard, but you imply the same shape with the came cut to a point.
It works for larger or smaller, just another step that copper let's you get around in a different way. I'm sure your instructors will have a view on it too. For most windows we'd then brush around a mix of plaster of Paris and I don't know what for water/weather proofing. Also for larger windows foil would just be a royal pain in the ass and likely not give a square window.
It offers the benefit of a guarantee for a straight edge, but then your only tack points are your vertices. I'm spoiled working with him, I'm sure there are design conserns for the work.
We made the family crest for me with a combo of basic stained glass and sad blasting a while back, I'll pull it out for some good photos soon.

QuantumTurk · July 2017

Hype to see more of your work in the field, showed dad some of this and he was excited at the idea of more people doing this. He was a bit down on it as a dying thing.

ceres · July 2017

That lighthouse looks amazing. You covered up the misstep really nicely without it looking awkward which is... really hard to do in pretty much any craft.

Elvenshae · July 2017

Thanks for the encouragement, everyone!

Elvenshae · July 2017

Not very many in-progress pictures to share for this week, since it was all about foiling.

Three kinds of foil - silvered, "natural," and black. The foil itself is basically copper tape with the sticky side being one of those three colors. You use the silvered foil when you're working with light-colored glass (especially clear) and you plan on leaving the solder the natural silver color. This results in the boundaries between your glass pieces being extra shiny and being a definite foreground element; very hard to miss. Natural adds some coppery tones, apparently, but I haven't really used it before, so I don't really know how it turns out. Black-backed foil goes well with an antique patina on the solder - it results in your solder lines more-or-less fading into the background.

So, you start from a corner (usually the top-left), and just apply the tape to each piece of glass, slowly working your way down and across. Your goal is to keep the foil centered on the outside of each piece, so that you get the same amount of copper on each face of the glass piece, all the way around. Misalignments can be fixed by using an exacto knife to cut off tiny bits of the copper foil without harming the glass underneath. Starting from one corner and proceeding to the other lets you adjust any pieces that have trouble fitting. In my case, the only piece I couldn't get to fit was the bottom white-piece of the lighthouse tower; it required a bit of grinding on one side to get it to fit. (Check the fit, then grind, then foil.)

At the end, you've got the point where I actually think stained glass tends to look the best, with all the pieces bordered by bright, shiny copper. Since I finished all the foiling during class tonight, I've got no homework this week; next week will be soldering and, if I finish quickly enough, framing and hanging - which means I might be about 1 week out from finishing my second piece!

ceres · July 2017

If it looks best here, I'm wondering what it will look like in the end. I do love the level shine it's got right now, is that going to go away in the final step? And if so, is there anyway to preserve it despite the usual fade?

Elvenshae · July 2017

@ceres

So, the copper foil is just there to give the solder (which is a 60/40 lead-tin mixture; my Dwarf Fortress-heart keeps wanting to call the whole thing lay pewter ...) a place to stick. The solder + foil forms the material that holds the glass in place; another way to do that is with lead came, like @QuantumTurk was talking about.

So, what you end up with after going through the soldering steps is a very shiny silver material with a slight bead to it covering all of the copper. You can leave it at that point, and just keep the shiny silver (though if you're doing that, you should probably use the silver-backed copper foil to make things even shinier). The benefit here is that it makes the "framing" portion of your stained glass very noticeable, which could be the artistic effect your're looking for; as I said above, it makes the material a "foreground element" for lack of a better word.

The other option is to patina it, which is when you take a chemical wash and wipe it all over the solder. There are different colors of patina, but in general they range from slightly darker silver ("pewter") to much darker silver ("antique"). These patinas are really easy to apply - you just get a couple of q-tips wet with the patina chemical and run them along the solder lines, which pretty much instantly darken. The amount they darken is dependent on the color of your patina and how much you apply. The darker your patina is, the more the joints in your piece fade into the background.

From my first piece (the sailboat), you can see the progression from copper foil to soldered (silver) to patina'd (antique):

Copper Foil:

Silver Solder:

Antique Black Patina

I'll try and get some better pictures of the lighthouse to show the differences as it goes through the stages.

Now, there is a copper-toned patina. Unfortunately, it tends to have somewhat mixed results, according to my instructors - it has to be done almost immediately, and it doesn't always come up very brightly coppered. One stained glass place had a blog post on how they get it to work for them, and it's pretty involved compared to normal silver patina: https://stainedglassexpress.com/blog/2012/04/heres-how-you-get-shiny-copper-patina/

It kinda looks like this when completed:

ceres · July 2017

I love that. But you're right, I think it really does look awesome at exactly this stage.

Elvenshae · July 2017

A wild business travel appears!
It uses Miss Two Weeks of classes!
It's super effective!

So, basically, the open question is how much of the soldering I want to do on my own in the interim. I probably won't be ably to frame the lighthouse until I'm back in class (I lack the materials and I haven't done that solo yet), but I have soldered before.

I'll just need to pick up the flux remover, since I forgot to buy some ...

ceres · July 2017

Post what you do! Interested to see how that pans out when you get back.

Elvenshae · August 2017

So, extended extra work trips set me up to miss three weeks of classes, but I smuggled myself into their Thursday night class so I could finish off my current project before my mom's birthday!

So, let's rewind a bit. In order to finish the project on time, I went ahead and had to do all of the soldering in advance. The solder is essentially what holds your stained glass together, so it needs to be thick enough to provide some strength, but thick, bulgy solder isn't pretty, so it's a fine line to walk. While soldering, you'll use a lot-ish of flux, which is a chemical that helps the solder to flow easily - you paint it onto your copper tape with a little paintbrush, and, when you're done soldering, you need to clean it off with some flux remover. (All the flux remover I've seen is double-duty flux and patina remover.) Cleaning it is very important because the flux isn't a nice chemical and will, eventually, damage your glass (or your hands).

Anyway, here's what it looks like when both sides get soldered together:

Note that, after completing the first side, I was able to completely remove the frame, since it was now held together by the solder. Also, since they're bright and shiny, the solder lines tend to stand out a bit - c.f. earlier discussions about foreground vs. background. Also, also, at this point, you've got a no-shit piece of stained glass work that can be held up to the light to see how pretty it'll look!

So, I was completely ready to bring this in to my glass, frame it and patina it, and be done! Except, when holding it up to the light, one small issue raised a fairly ugly head. If I zoom in real close, you can kinda see it ...

Do you see the problem? Here, I'll highlight it ...

Yeah, so there's a very, very thin line in the "grass" that shouldn't be there - a fracture in the glass. Those kinds of fractures occur when the glass gets too hot when you're soldering it, it tries to expand, has nowhere to go, and expresses its frustration in the only way it can. So, why did the glass get too hot? Well, since I'm still practicing at this whole stained glass thing, my cuts aren't always perfect, so there was a bit of a gap between the pieces up there. You can usually fill in those gaps by adding some extra solder - and this can actually strengthen the whole piece, overall, if you do it intentionally in the right spots. Unfortunately, what I did was add some extra solder, but heat it up too much, causing the solder on the other side to run and spread as the heat was conducted over to it, so I had to clean up the other side by reheating that solder ... Lather, rinse, repeat a couple of times and the glass has now gotten pretty hot, and fractures. Oops.

So I get to try out another stained glass technique - repair! I did this part in-class so I could have someone knowledgeable watching over me. (And a good chunk of their business is actually repairing stained glass for other people.)

How do you repair stained glass? Well, first, you need to get rid of the broken piece. You do this by scoring the hell out of it with your glass cutter:

Then, you turn it over, and smack it - very gently, at first - with something hard. If you use one of those ol'skool cutters it comes with a handy breaking ball on the back of it. In my case, I just used my breaker / grozers. Anyway, continue scoring and tapping until you've got as much glass out as you can, then use pliers to carefully peel the remaining broken shards of glass out of the solder and tape:

(You can see above that, even with all of that, I wasn't able to get the last pieces out of the tip of the land.) With your soldering iron, you then go around the broken area very, very carefully, heating the solder just enough to pull out the copper tape that used to be around the broken piece. Hold the tape in some pliers (in case it gets hot), and then slowly heat the solder and pull, heat and pull, all the way around. Here's a "mid-way through" shot of the back of the piece

When that's done, you need to remove all of the excess solder so that you can cut a clean piece to get it in and resolder it in place. The easiest way to do this is to hold the piece vertically, run your soldering iron over the seams, and let the now-melted solder fall to the work table below. Once it cools and hardens, you can scrape it up to use again - likely just as tacking material (when you put small globs of solder down on joints to hold the piece together before soldering all of the pieces together).

Once you've cleaned out the old solder, you can lay the glass on some paper and trace out a new pattern piece for the hole. You don't want to go back to the original pattern, because you've already introduced small variations through cutting, grinding, taping, and soldering the other pieces of glass.

Then, cut it out and grind it into place just like any other piece, leaving yourself a bit of room for taping it in copper, then solder it back into place. Since you've already soldered both sides, the whole panel isn't going to lie perfectly flat, so you need to put some coins underneath the new piece. In my case, all I needed was three pennies, but sometimes you'll need to stack them a bit higher.

I took this opportunity to rotate the green glass 90 degrees, which caused the initially left-right pattern in the glass to go up-down instead. I thought this might give a bit more differentiation vs. the left-right pattern in the water. I'm not 100% sure if this was the right idea or not, but can't really change it now!

Framing is done by taking a zinc frame bar and cutting it into appropriately-sized sections. I forgot to take pictures of this process because I was running out of class time and was hurrying, but it goes pretty easily if you've got a mitre box or a mitre saw. Measure twice, cut once, etc., and you'll have 4 frame sections that fit together like this:

Then, to finalize the frame, you solder the corners. To make this easier, you place two pieces of tape at each corner, marking out a square, and then fill that square with a little "pillow" of solder. (The tape also helps you hold the frame to the panel while you're moving things around.) Again, do this 4x and you've got a solid frame around your piece.

You then glue the piece into the frame by filling in the gaps that you left at the edges with solder and dragging that solder just onto the frame. Tape is also useful here to keep your solder from running like crazy all over your frame (which looks sloppy). Hanging rings are added by going to the top corners on the back of your piece, warming up the solder at the joints in the frame, and then pressing them down (with some pliers; they'll get hot!) while adding more solder to hold them in place.

(Example gaps before the frame was added.)

After everything has cooled, you clean off the whole thing with flux remover.

The last, optional, step, is to patina your solder. You're totally allowed to leave it silver if that's the effect you want, but I like the "antique" look of black patina. (I think, for my next piece, I'll leave the solder silver and use the silver-backed tape for a different effect.) The patina is a chemical that causes the lead solder to turn dark - it turns darker, faster, the more you use. The best way I've seen to apply it is to use q-tips, holding two in your hand and just running them down either side of the solder (please forgive the bad artist's impression):

After you're done, you gotta clean it again with patina cleaner (again, usually the same thing as flux cleaner) because while flux is not a nice chemical the patina is really not nice. At the end, you get some dark solder lines between the pieces, which makes them kinda fade into the background a bit. Here's the front partially patina'd so you can see the contrast:

And then both sides completely patina'd:

Last but not least, here's the before-and-after of the patina on the front:

Last thing to do is take a picture of it hanging up in the sun, but that'll require a sunny day - which hasn't happened since I gave it away!

Elvenshae · August 2017

For my next trick, I'll be both designing a pattern and working in a round form!

ceres · August 2017

I'll be honest with you, I could NOT see that crack. I take it would have weakened the piece significantly?

Elvenshae · August 2017

@ceres

Yeah - it turned one piece of glass into two that weren't totally soldered in. Also, the brighter the light behind it, the way more obvious it became.

Ken O · August 2017

This has been super interesting to read. Thanks for not only sharing but going into such detail with it. You do a fantastic job of explaining all the processes involved.

Elvenshae · August 2017

Thanks, @Ken O !

Happy to drag everyone along on my learning adventure, and maybe get someone else hooked, too.

ceres · August 2017

I went to a 2-day glass workshop that included the basics, including glass blowing. I loved it, and haven't done something quite like it since. It's amazing hobby, but also extremely expensive to maintain. The pros at the studio spent about 3/4 of their week making garbage little baubles for stores and fairs and stuff (also sometimes running workshops like the one I took) in order to afford the studio time so they could work on their own projects in their downtime. It's the kind of thing you'd take on as a hobby only if you were otherwise financially well-off, because the studio rental is so expensive it just doesn't pay unless it's your full-time job. So it's fun to do, but not something I'll be able to afford as a hobby any time soon.

What is this class running you, approximately, if you don't mind my asking?

Elvenshae · August 2017

@ceres

The intermediate class was $100, and usually covers 5 ... I'll call them "lessons." It's really a combination of studio time, expert advice, and physical-assistance-with-the-actual-process (e.g., "Here, let me do one of the corners on your frame to show you how it's done; now do that on the other ones"). They're 2 hours each (ED: but you can show up a bit early and get started; they don't mind!).

During the summer months, the same price covers 13 lessons.

The beginner course, which includes all the materials and up to ~8 hours of studio time over two days, was ... a gift, so I don't know the exact price, but I think somewhere between $50 and $100.

The intermediate class is really about walking you through the process of picking your pattern, selecting the right glass, and making it - along the way, they go into the required materials ("This week we need patterns, glue and glass cutters; next week, foil; etc."). You need to either get them on your own or buy them at the store. The store has stained glass grinders for use during class, since they're the hardest thing to lug around, and incidentals to borrow (pencils, sharpies, scissors, etc.) but otherwise you're supposed to be putting your own kit together. The price for your own stuff is not included in the class price, but most of what you end up getting will be a more-or-less permanent part of your work table; the stuff you need to keep buying over time is solder, tape, glass, and frames. At the end of the class, you'll have the knowledge and gear to go out and do your own thing.

That's one of the reasons I'm taking the opportunity to make my own pattern, which I ran by the shop owner / teacher for hints and tips.

Elvenshae · September 2017

So, I mentioned that for my next trick, I was going to be making my own pattern. Which I did! My plan was to make something big and shiny for my oldest son, Tommy, since his birthday's coming up. I wanted to use this next piece to try two new things:

1) Make my own pattern; and
2) Make something round.

Accordingly, I decided to make what's called a suncatcher - basically just a big piece with lots of transparent / mildly translucent glass, lots of shininess, etc. I seized on the idea of doing a Celtic knotwork T, figuring it would be an interesting challenge and would look really nice when done. I spent a couple of hours scouring the net for pre-created patterns, source images, random bits of Celtic art, etc., for inspiration, and then got started. I zeroed in on the following as my main inspirations:

The Ts themselves were, I thought, a bit too busy to act as good patterns - the green-yellow-on-black T would've been a hundred+ pieces of glass, not including a border of clear surrounding pieces - but the basics were there. I really honed in on the three-color triskele as the right way forward. So, here are the steps I went through and building out my pattern:

First, I knew I wanted a circle with a border, and a T in the middle. So, I knocked something out the basics in Gimp pretty quickly:

Next was to figure out the flow of the knotwork. There are a couple of ways to draw it, depending on whether you're doing a pattern with breaks (like the first T) or without (the second T). I decided to go without breaks this time; the last time I'd drawn knotwork for anything (my backer coat of arms for The Banner Saga), I used them and liked them, but I wanted something simpler for this one. So, I basically doodled around with the pencil in Gimp, until I'd identified more-or-less the pattern I wanted, and then indicated in a separate color where the crossovers would be.

That looked like a good starting point, so I then switched over to paths, where I could more easily tweak things without relying on my own drawing skill. Since the pattern I wanted was symmetrical, apart from the crossovers, I only needed to path out half of it, stroke it, and then create a mirror copy to get "perfect" results. So, eventually, I got this:

... and turned it into this:

... which I then turned into borders to lay out the pieces of glass:

That looked like a pretty serviceable Celtic-knotwork T; I figured I could do it without too many individual pieces of glass, it had some nice margins for large spots of clear glass for maximum sun, it was circular ... But after I printed it out (to see what it looked like on paper) and stared at it for a few minutes, I just wasn't very happy with it. It was too plain, the pieces were too thin, the shape was just ... off. So, back into Gimp I went, and I started tweaking the paths again to make it chunkier and add some variation. This led to:

... which turned into:

That, I thought, was a much better base for the T shape. I grabbed the borders off of it, and really liked the way it looked:

One of the important things to remember about cutting glass (see my discussion up above about the mis-cut on the light-blue portion of the lighthouse) is that it hates deep convex curves. So, with that in mind, I went ahead and penciled in where I thought I'd need to break up the T into smaller pieces to:

Achieve the multiple crossovers required by the knotwork;
Allow for three different colors (c.f. the triskele inspiration piece);
Minimize the number and extent of the convex curves (keeping in mind that, with Celtic knotwork as my base pattern, there were going to be a lot of them anyway);
Keep the pattern "pretty" (e.g., adhering to some kind of aesthetic sensibility), by providing some degree of visual interest and symmetry; and,
Split up the clear glass areas into logical pieces.

The result of that work was this:

Which, okay, now we're talking. That actually looked, to me, like something worth making. A quick print test later revealed a problem - although my initial prints were done on normal 8.5"x11" paper, and the final was going to be a 10" circle, so everything would be slightly scaled up, the highlighted triangle was just too small to worth cutting a piece of glass for, and it was going to make the surrounding glass pieces slightly harder to cut. So, it had to go:

A few quick edits, and some test colors added, and I had what looked to be a solid first draft of my plan:

I submitted it to my instructor, who actually really liked it, but thought that I'd made more cuts in the clear sections than was actually required. She recommended removing the lines marked with hashes:

(My printer didn't make things as distinct as they were on my screen, so I labeled all of the pieces with the proposed color - Dark blue, Medium blue, Light blue, and Clear.)

That done, I had the final pattern ready to go on my computer. It looked, if I dare say so, pretty frickin' awesome (spoilered for the huge):

I was ready to go! Only one small problem - my printer couldn't do 11x17 paper (needed to house the entirety of a 10" circle), and taping together two sheets of 8.5x11 would be bad for what-I-hope-are-obvious reasons, so I had to send the file over to the local UPS store to print out for me. I picked them up on the way to class (like, 5 minutes before the place closed), and ran into another issue ... the guy printing them out couldn't actually get the circle to be 10" across. He could get it to be 10.5" across, or 8" across. Luckily for me, he actually printed them out at 10.5" across. Slightly-oversized plans in hand, I made it to class, and figured the right way forward would be to just center the pattern in my form, resulting in a slightly-larger T than anticipated and a slightly-thinner border, which might even be an improvement. I laid them out, staked 'em down, traced in the changes, wrote in my color assignment (and piece numbers, not shown here), and figured I was set.

I had a great pattern, and I had surely run into all of the issues I was going to, right? Just the mechanics to work through now, right?

Spoiler alert: I did not have a great pattern, and it (ED: the very specific and seemingly minor way it was not great) was going to bite me in the ass a lot while putting this together. But more on that later ...

ceres · September 2017

Haha, at first I thought you were going to go for the middle 'T', complete with that one knot along the base. I have tried to use that knot before, and it does not translate well into.. well.. pretty much any non-paper medium without extreme difficulty. As a beginner anything at all you would have been at that until the sun burned out.

Elvenshae · September 2017

@ceres What'd you try to make it into, if you don't mind my asking?

ED: The parts I ended up really stealing from the middle one were the two-twists for the arms (though I used it for the trunk, as well, because I'm not quite that insane ...) and the wider base.

ceres · September 2017

I helped my mom design a quilt. She managed, and managed well because she's good at it, but it was insane watching her try to pin it down. I've seen it done in wire jewelry, but honestly I didn't think it looked that great. It really needs to be flat, and if you aren't intending for it to be flat then the material needs to be able to hold a point and support itself, because without the point it just looks like a knot you didn't finish pulling.

Elvenshae · September 2017

Hokay, so, pattern problems.

Basically, my pattern was perfectly fine - really awesome, in fact, except for the one minor, almost inconsequential way in which it was not.

That flaw?

Line thickness.

Yep, so, I created it in GIMP, which means it's a raster image; when I scaled it up for printing, everything scaled. So the fairly reasonably-thick lines at 7.5"x7.5" circle size (test print on 8.5x11" paper) were now quite a bit thicker at 10.5"x10.5" size (real print on 11x17" paper).

With your foil scissors, you're supposed to cut out the black lines of your pattern, which leaves you with the white paper parts defining the size of your glass pieces. With the somewhat-ridiculously thick black lines I had in my pattern, it was actually really hard to keep my scissors running down the middle of the line, so I'd veer one way and then another as I cut out the paper, and then once placed on the glass it was actually challenging to not accidentally cut away or grind away the parts covered in the black paper. This resulted in my pieces being somewhat gappy when finally put together. I.e., I knew that a particular piece was supposed to have a smooth and graceful curve to a point, but the pattern I was cutting and grinding to was sloppy, so to "follow the pattern" I'd've had to make a jagged curve and I didn't, which meant the pieces didn't really fit as well together as they should have.

It also resulted in the pattern cuts for the interior pieces ...

... being nothing like the paper designs. The two rounds at the end of the top bar of the T were the worst offenders; instead of the vaguely teardrop shapes they were supposed to have, they were way more square. They were also, despite the scaling up of the whole design, still rather on the small side, which made them even harder to cut to the pattern. I cut them out and, frankly, they looked horrible.

In addition, there were several times where I'd be cutting a piece (usually a convex curved portion), and I'd have it just about perfect, when I'd attempt on more cut and end up snapping the glass in the middle.

... so I had to recut the same piece a couple of times (and, since I didn't have any spare patterns and no easy way to get more, I ended up just copying the piece over using a sharpie, which caused its own share of issues). In the end, I gave up on actually cutting some of the glass and just used the grinder to get the fine details correct. This worked so much better and gave me a lot of fine control over the final curves (especially when using the smaller optional grinder bit that I can mount in the lower, main bit).

Still and all, by the end of the process, I was able to get the majority of the pieces cut and put into place:

(One change is that I decided at the last minute that I liked the light blue glass better than the medium blue glass, so I switched the medium patterns onto the light glass and the light patterns onto the medium glass.)

The interior pieces I'd cut ended up not looking nice (poor fit, poor shape, etc.) and the whole thing was, as I said, gappy, so I decided to fix two birds with one stone. (I was also unhappy with one of the border pieces, which came out slightly narrower than the others.) I foiled the main pieces ...

(Again, hot damn do I love the look of foiled glass ...)

... and after checking for fit, took it all apart, flipped the whole thing over, and put it together backwards. See, one of the other wrinkles is that the clear glass was slightly thicker than the colored glass, all of which was, at least to the naked eye, the same thickness. This meant that the glass would be uneven on one side or the other, and I decided to make the flat side of the clear glass flush with the colored glass. By flipping the pattern, it put the flat side of the glass against the wood, which made the whole thing uneven on my side but flat on the other. (I also pulled out the now-unnecessary pattern paper.)

Then, I tacked everything down with solder, doing my best to force the pieces of glass outward against the frame and putting as much of the gaps as possible into the interior pieces. I'm not sure if there's a good way to describe it, but basically by moving the dark blue part of the crossbar up a bit, it reduced the gaps between it and the clear piece above it and the clear piece and the border, at the expense of making the gap between it and medium blue piece below it slightly larger.

If I did that all over the piece, I'd end up with smaller gaps between the pieces I wasn't changing, and interior pieces that fit their assigned slots ever worse than before. But that was okay, because I was going to use what I'd learned about replacing broken glass to trace out new pieces for them that would perfectly fit the new holes.

Tacking, BTW, in case I haven't said it before, is when you take small amounts of solder and just put a small dot on most of the joints; it turns your collection of dozens of individual pieces of glass into one, surprisingly flexible, piece, making it much easier to transport. It was important that I tack the glass only on the uneven side; I needed the flat side to be completely flat (and not uneven because of the differing heights of my solder tacks) to make the next step easier.

I was then able to put the piece flat-side down, lift it up on some risers (I used pieces of the clear glass), slide the new glass under it, and trace out a new pattern with my sharpie to fit exactly what I wanted. I'd then cut it ... eh, sorta close? ... and then finish it with the grinder. The main benefit of this is that it got me pieces that fit basically exactly where I wanted them. The main drawback is that it was very, very slow. I mean, take a couple swipes with the grinder, test, grind, test, grind, test, grind, test for each of the 6 interior pieces and the new border piece.

The new border piece, well, it mostly fit. And it was getting a little late. And it mostly fit, and I'd foiled it already, and I just couldn't do it. I literally looked at it, sitting there slightly too big and with an odd angle to it, and thought, "In for a penny, in for a pound." I grabbed my exacto knife, peeled off the copper tape, and took another pass at it. This time, I ground on the inside of the curve - I put one end where it should have gone, and noted where it bumped against the clear piece inside of it. I ground that a bit, and noticed it fit a little cleaner - so I found the next part where it bumped. I wish I'd taken some pictures of this process, but honestly - I was so excited when I noticed that it was working that I forgot to do it. But, basically, the inside of the curve was slightly too shallow, which threw the whole piece out of alignment.

Just a couple small tweaks here and the whole piece slide much more fully into place; I'd made it just a little too long, but it was almost trivial to just grind a couple millimeters off the end, keeping it flat. Honestly, as this one little piece was coming together, I felt like a total rockstar. And when I foiled it and got it put back into place, and it was no longer sticking out past the pieces on either side, I knew it was worth the extra effort - coming back to it had totally been the right decision.

So I foiled the new pieces and dropped them in, then tacked them in place:

... and then, heedful of the fact that last time I'd soldered things together I'd accidentally cracked the glass, proceeded to quickly and efficiently solder the whole thing together on both sides. I made sure to work in long lines and alternate which side (left or right, not front and back) of the piece I was working on. I made sure to keep my iron slightly off the glass to avoid remelting the other side's solder when I flipped it over. In pretty short order, I had the whole thing put together:

It was about 1am at that point, so I waited until the next evening when the kiddos were asleep to take it outside to see if I could get some sun through it. The sun obliged.

Last items for class tomorrow are framing it (figuring out round framing is new for this piece) and adding a hanging ring. No patina for this one - the solder is staying bright, shiny silver and I even used the silver-backed copper tape to make it even shinier.

Almost done and ready to move on to the next item ... which I think might be some small, 3-D items for Christmas for the kids and my nieces.

HappylilElf · September 2017

This is a a fantastic thread.

Thank you, Elvenshae.

Elvenshae · September 2017

Quick update: My son loves his stained glass "T". So, the week before I finished it, he came into the garage one day and saw the pieces all spread out on my workbench. He asked me what I was making, and I prevaricated, so he asked me who I was making it for, so I lied. Then he said, "Can you make me something some day?"

"Oh, yeah, of course I can!"

Yeah, so it turned out pretty well!

When he saw me installing this, my youngest (who just turned 2; he's laying on his brother's bed in the pic above) starting asking in his semi-wordless way where his was. So, at some point, I'll definitely need to do that ...

But first, on to the Christmas assembly line! I've got 5 total sons and nieces, so I started looking for a pattern I could use for all of them. I eventually decided on angel stained-glass ornaments; my great uncle and great aunt gave me and my brother and sister some stained glass stockings, and we've still got them, so I wanted to evoke that tradition.

My goals for this project are 1) to make a lot of smaller pieces quickly, 2) to use as much of the glass I already have as possible, 2) to make something 3D (glass overlaid on glass, inspired by a lady in my class who is making an owl-on-a-branch pattern where the owl's claws are literally on top of the branch), 3) learn how to do wirework, 4) figure out how to do borders on irregular shapes, 5) practice my cutting, 5) learn how to count, and 6) have fun.

Googling around for suitable patterns got me to this:

... which is freely available from here: http://www.glasscrafters.biz/hdr/hdr_img/fp/FP-0239.pdf

It met a lot of the criteria I was looking for - it was composed of relatively few pieces that were individually somewhat complex, it had the overlay I wanted to learn, etc. My instructor took one look at it and exclaimed, "We can do way better than the wire halo it's got; oh, and you can add some hands and have the angel holding lots of stuff - stars, instruments ..." She drew a couple quick examples on my pattern sheet, which I don't have any more but which looked something like this:

I thought those were great ideas but that, even with them, the pattern was maybe just a little too simplistic, so I decided to doctor it up by adding some trim to the robe:

Apart from giving me another opportunity to practice some pretty deep convex cuts, it also allowed me to do something I personally liked. See, when I called my mother-in-law to ask about my niece's favorite colors (bro- and sis-in-law being at work at the time), my MIL said that the oldest liked "blue," and the youngest liked "whatever the oldest had."

So, adding the trim to the robes let me reverse the colors - using, in this case, a darker blue for the robes and a lighter blue for the trim on the oldest's angel, and then reversing them for the youngest.

So, with the new plan firmly in-mind, I was off to the races ... and the Assembly Line. The only new piece of glass in this project is the pearlescent pink, because my youngest niece is definitely a pink baby and, for some reason, I hadn't bought any pink glass yet.

(You can kinda see it on the pinkish piece of glass on the middle-right, but I decided to free-hand the hand pieces, just drawing little "U"s in Sharpie, rather than trying to make patterns for them.)

The wings have proven to be ever-so-slightly challenging, because of the indentation where the wings come together; it's just not a way in which glass likes to be cut. Combine this with the relatively fracture-prone white glass, and the best way I came up with doing it was to just get close and then finish with the smaller grinding attachment:

I think with a manual grinding stone I could get the point there a little sharper, but what I've got isn't looking too bad so far.

One of the tricks I learned when doing the Celtic T was, when doing convex cuts, have as much glass as possible on the "keep" side of the glass to reduce breakage. As an example, here's how I laid out the trim pieces for my sons' angels:

(Tommy, the oldest, gets blue robes with green trim; Gregory gets green robes with blue trim.)

When cutting them, I'm tried to approach it in the following way:

1: Separate the trim part from the other parts, leaving a lot of glass behind the cut (everything to the right of 2-5)
2-5: Do a series of echo cuts to get the convex curve looking nice.
6: Trim off the large piece of glass, so I can save it for later.
7-10: Cut out the concave side of the curve using the normal circle method.
11-12: (Not pictured) Trim the ends of the ... trim ... square.

So far, I haven't broken a single piece of trim while doing my echo cuts, unlike last time with the pieces for the T.

Since I've got to ship them cross-country, I started on the two for my long-distance nieces:

... and I like how they've turned out so far:

Next will be foiling them and soldering them together so that I can bring two nearly-complete pieces to class next week, where (theoretically) I'll learn how to do the 3D join and the wiring.

Penny Arcade

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