Craft Fair!

My friend Laura and I are going to be doing our first Craft Fair in Dec! So excited! She makes the most amazing cards and I'm going to try and sell some pendants for some Christmas spends. Eeek!!!

Finished!

My second project is finished! I'm so proud of myself.
I finished up the soldering, framing and patina today and brought the new baby home.  I think it looks really cool and I have plans to put it in an interior door at some point.

Please tell me it does actually look like an aspen?!

Next to come will be some Christmas ornaments I think. I want to practice my soldering and glass cutting and at the same time make something I can give to my family and friends.
After that, I have a really big project in mind...

Foiling Complete!

I finished the foiling of my panel today, so, when I get to it, I'm ready to start soldering! Yippeee!!
It looks better even just cleaned up a little with the numbers missing.

Cool or what?!

If you're wondering why the piece must be 'foiled' first, it's because I need to solder it together, and, solder doesn't stick to glass, so the adhesive-backed foil provides that metal to metal contact to hold everything together.

New Stained Glass Piece!

This is the progress I've made thus far in my second stained glass piece. I figured I would actually take a couple of 'in-process' pics with this one to show how the piece is done. These were taken with the camera on my phone, so you'll have to excuse the poor quality. The first shows the panel with all the pieces cut, ground and fitted into the pattern.

The next pic shows my progress today on foiling the pieces - I got about a third of it completed. I think it fits in pretty well with the season right now. I can't wait to see how it is when it's finished!

Stained Glass!

I've been slowly adding some pendants to the Etsy shop, but this post is more to showcase another little project I've been working on. I'm very proud of it, since it's my first piece, I've never soldered before and I actually like it!
I've been taking a stained glass class, which consists of one sampler project (this one) for which you choose your own glass and colours and another independent project, where you take everything you learned from doing the first and apply it to something that you have chosen for yourself.
There are a bunch of steps involved with constructing a stained glass piece. Here they are, very roughly of course -

- Choose a pattern
- Choose your glass
- Transfer pattern to glass
- Cut glass
- Grind glass to fit exactly in your pattern
- Foil edge of glass (solder doesn't stick to glass)
- Assemble and flux
- Solder both sides
- Cut frame and solder together
- Clean flux off
- Patina
- Clean patina off and polish.

And - ta-da!

This is what you get -

My first stained glass piece - otherwise known as "Sauron". And yes, I know I'm a dork.

I finally think I've found a hobby in glass work where my ever so slight tendencies towards anal retentiveness are useful....