This Towel Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us
Ellen and Jane were in today during our morning class and, as always, they both kept very busy.
Ellen ground the right side of her Grape Trellis and then cut and ground one of the grape bunches. Needless to say, she’ll be doing more wrapping at home this week.  It’s really starting to look like a window now that everything is fitted together. Do you see all the little white things near the bottom of the pattern? That’s the pattern pieces for the remaining grapes that have to be cut out! If anyone has a preference to which bunch of grapes gets cut and ground next week just leave a comment here telling us which 2 you want to see worked on next week. We’ll let Ellen decide in the event of a tie. 
The title of our blog comes from a comment made during class. No matter how many towels we have laying around, I always walk away with them. I had ground and washed 2 grapes and I then stole Ellen’s towel to dry them off just as she needed it. We shared the towel a bit before I told her that “This towel ain’t big enough for the two of us” which made us both chuckle. I told her it would make the perfect title for the blog today, and it is.Â
Jane wasn’t sure what to expect when she came in. She’s working on a window for her daughter and although she knew what the pattern looked (having seen it online and in a catalog) she didn’t know what size it would be.  We started out trying to squeeze it down into 2 seperate windows for sidelights but they proved to be too narrow for basic design of the pattern. So now we have a FULL sized window. Jane came in, picked out glass, traced her pattern, cut out all the leaves in the lower section of the pattern and then cut out the two shades of green. That’s a lot of work for one class! Here’s her pattern and then another shot of the pattern with the green leaves she cut in place on the pattern.
Our night class consisted of Gerald and Lane. Gerald had wrapped the border of his cross window, came in and then tacked it all together. He added a brass channel around the edges to finish it off and to help protect the glass from and sharp hits against its edges. He added two hooks, soldered the six leaves at an angle to the front of the window onto the vine that is actually cut into the glass, washed it, colored it and called it finished. Here’s what it looks like hanging in the shop.
And lastly we have Lane, who came in to work on his huge Iris window. To his surprise, the actual glass cutting appears to be fairly easy –there aren’t a lot of sharp curves throughout the window. Most of the pieces are nice steady curves that he had no problem cutting. First he had to trace out the pattern onto another paper that he could cut up and place on top of the glass he picked. After he got all the pattern traced out he cut it out placing the leaves and flower petals back onto the pattern. We decided to start cutting the leaves out of glass first and he managed to get almost all of the dark green cut. He also discoved rather quickly that you don’t have to press evry hard on the utter at all to get a nice even cut. I’m guessing that next week he’ll have all the leaves cut and ground. He can then take his peices home to wrap. I’m guessing he’ll do that on a table rather than do it where Gerald wrapped his glass… And that’s all I’m going to say.
Although it rained while we were all working and there was plenty of thunder and lightning but we had no power outage tonight!
Paul