One Finished Window & Another One Getting Close
Craig started the class tonight assuming that he would need another week to finish his window but by 7:00 we all knew that it would be finished that night. When he left last week he had finished tacking all of the window together. Tonight was to be a night of soldering, which normally doesn’t take long, but his window is almost 3 foot by 3 foot in size so I told him not to expect to get it all finsihed in one night. There was a lot to solder but Craigs soldering was beautiful and needed no touching up on my part. The first side was completed just after 7:00 pm which meant that he would most likely finish the second side by 8 or 8:30. That left us with washing and cleaning the window, which actually took longer to do than the actual soldering.  In the end we ended up taking it outside and hosing it down while we went over it with a sponge to get rid of the oily flux and small solder balls that form as you solder something that large.
In the end I think that Craig was VERY happy with what he accomplished. I’d like to have been able to take a picture of this window in the sunlight but that’s not possible when your class takes place at night. Below are two pictures of this stunning window. The picture to the left shows it while being illuminated from the back by a flourescent light. The one on the right was taken with a flash so you can see the texture of the glass that was used. Craig did a great job and we can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.
Gerald arrived after work and started in on reconstructing all the pieces he’d wrapped at home over the week. Then he set about tacking the center part together. We’d left some small pieces blank so we could fill it with the same glass that he planned to use for his background. Once he had everything tacked together he had to cut the Seedy Glass so he had two perfectly square pieces. Next he laid out his background and placed the center piece he tacked together on top of it. Since the pieces for his background weren’t long enough to cover the entire pattern we had to bend the rules a bit to get it appear to be cut from one big continuous sheet of glass. Careful cutting left him with pieces large enough to fill in the areas the background glass wouldn’t originally cover. The trick was insuring that the grain of the glass was consistant through it all. Once that was finished he had to carefully grind and wrap everything and again tack it all together. His last step was filling in those small pieces he’d left opened with the leftover scrap from the background.  It would have been easier to manage if we could have cut them first but you should always cut your larger pieces before the small ones. There’s nothing worse than cutting your small, easy pieces and then realizing that you no longer have a piece long enough to get your remaining larger pieces from. Luckily that didn’t happen to Gerald. Here’s what he has this week. Next week his border glass will be here and he’ll have this tacked all together. To the left is his window without the glare of a flash on it. To the right we have the flash on so you can see the texture of the glass he used.
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We have 2 more classes coming up tomorrow so be sure to come back and see what else our students have accomplished during their class.
Paul