The Orchid Stained Glass Project

Work has begun on the "big" stained glass project: Jack the Orchid. This will go to Florida when done, immortalizing, a famous (to us) orchid known as Jack, in honor of a neighbor named Jack Stone, who gave this native orchid to Vic at least 30 years ago and it's still going strong after tens of divisions, while Jack himself is long gone. This has been on the mental drawing board since about the summer of 2010. Getting it all on paper is what takes so long, but as of around Christmas time this baby was ready to roll. We found a free orchid pattern online which is very close to Jack, so I worked from that. It will be 18 inches high and about 16.75 inches wide. Each piece has to be numbered, color coded, and directionalized for the cutting. This is the time-consuming, non-fun part of the project: it all has to be decided before you start, which for us fly-by-the seat-of-our-pants-type like me, is scary.

So first you print out two sets of the drawing: one to work from on the worktable, and the other to cut up into individual pieces with the special sissors, which has two blades and creates enough space between pieces for the copper foil which will be wrapped around each piece (so the solder has something to stick to). Stained glass can be done two ways: with lead channel strips which are soldered at their joints, or by copper foil, also called the Tiffany Method (like the lamps) which is better for little pieces, like this design. So I'm going foil on this one. This means I'll be soldering along every line you see up there. both sides. yeah, I know....

As of last night, Dec. 26, I've cut a few pieces in the lower left edge, and have stopped to discover how much I don't know and am figuring things out as I type. Here's a shot of the workspace and another shot of the working craft shed.

In the box lid on the right are all the little pieces which will need to be cut from glass and grinded to exact shape, then the edges wrapped in narrow copper foil.

The workspace. Doesn't take much space to assemble.