Wenesday Evening- Oh, What A Night!
First off. I must thank Cheryl for bringing to my attention the fact that this entry wasn’t posted yet. Two minutes ago I got an email stating that I must be on vacation since I always get the blog posted within a day or two of the class. I read the email, scratched my head and said to myself, “I know I wrote it…†but sure enough when I looked on the blog it wasn’t there. It turns out that I hit the SAVE button rather than the POST button when I finished it so it never went public. 
I’m so sorry about my screw up! So here’s what I wrote Thursday morning:
It was a wild night for sure as a thunder storm knocked out our power for a good 2 hours tonight. We were able to light one table with a portable battery and an inverter which served us fine until we were able to get the generator up and running about a half hour later. Then with the use of a few extention cords were were able to make the most of the night…
Joey came in to get some more work done on his Mickey Mouse and accomplished exactly what I thought he would even though we had our power problem for 2 hours. Tonight he cut the black features of the face, the white gloves and eyes, the tan face sections and finally the red robes. We had saved the toughest cuts (the red glass) for last so Joey could gain more experience and confidence with the cutter before he tackled the more curvey pieces. In the end he had no problem at all and his cutting has improved dramatically since he cut his butterfly just 2 weeks ago.
When it was time to grind his pieces we plugged in the grinder only to discover that it caused a bit of a drain on the generator which caused the lights to flicker quite a bit. As we began unplugging lights in areas of the shop we weren’t using the power came back on and solved our problem. Talk about good timing. Joey was then able to start grinding (we’ll cut the background after the mouse is all tacked together) from the bottom on upward. He’s up to the belt on Mickey’s robes and doing wonderfully as you can see from the picture below. I’m confident that all the grinding will be finished next week and Joey will be wrapping his pieces before he heads home.
Russ finished soldering his latest beveled window which is made of baroque glass with a final waterglass border. It features a beveled cluster in the center with 2 seperate bevel borders. All this needs is a quick touch up to take care of some ‘run-throughs’* and then a bath and some color on the lead. We’ll have finished pictures of this one next week for sure.
Lastly, I worked on finishing Lane’s pattern for next week so we can get an idea of how much glass we’ll need to have on hand. The peacock window is now wrapped and all ready for some solder to hold it all together. Next I have to draw out the background and the curved-rectangular inner border. The glass is ordered so we should see more progress next week.
Lastly, we had some visitors in the shop tonight who wanted to see the process of making stained glass windows. As luck would have it they arrived at the height of our little blackout and I have to apologize for not being able to show them more while they were in although Russ did a great job of filling them in on just what’s involved and how a stained glass window is all put together.
Paul
* A ‘Run-Through’ occures when you solder the second side of a stained glass window. The melted solder can get hot enough to melt through to the first side this creating a blob of solder that has to be removed and then smoothed over. They’re common occurances and happen to the best of us.