Not A New Leaf

I'm not going to complain today.
I'm going to share another of my mom's windows with you.  (no, actually two of them)

Because she is saga-scale talented, you guys, and dedicated, and absolutely composed of the light she's using to put stuff like this together for other people.

I'm so proud of her.

It is a "privacy screen" for our hometown librarian to work behind at the main desk of the library.

The design is pine trees and aspen trees and sunshine and frost and pretty much solid Colorado from top to bottom.
I think she did a great job keeping it stylized to match the re-decorated interior
while still capturing what the client wanted.

This is her design, her work, and likely it's almost all glass sourced from her existing stock.  Interestingly that existing stock is largely filled with old glass from her local restoration projects; most of which include the local churches.  There's church glass in here, y'all.  Lutheran and Catholic for sure.  Probably a few others in there too.  That makes me so happy to see, for something like this, in a public library that frankly belongs in the Smithsonian collection.  Now the glass belongs to everyone.  And it still 'works'.  :)

Interestingly, THIS is the window she put in her own home recently.  This is what she designs for herself you guys!  Can you IMAGINE?  I just love this one so much.  And can I tell you?  It's in the BATHROOM.  No seriously...  it's a bathroom window in my parents' house.  Come on!  Not Fair!

Way to go mom.  You continue to inspire me in ways that neither of us is prepared to admit publicly.

'cause you know... we'd get all choked up and stuff.

Nice Things

In honor of some very good news, lately, let's just look at some very nice things.

Light. I just love glass. The colors, the lines... the textures and patterns... That's good medicine right there. All of the above are original work done by my mother (I helped on a lot of them) and the window with 2 cranes is a window that my husband and I made for his mother.

Light. Glass. So easy to fall in love with.

The Lamp I Hate.

I don't 'hate' the lamp... I just hate it.

You know?

Tips? Suggestions? What should I do with this monstrosity? It came with the house... so it's always been there, sneering at me when I come down the stairs every morning and leering at me as I rumble my sagging self up the stairs every night. It is too clear, too angle-ee, too "fake candle"-ee, too brassy, too chain-ee (heh, chaney) ...

Tell me... What would you do with something like this?

New, round, drum-style shade?

Sandblast/etch the glass?

Put new glass around it to make a column of colored glass?

Let the twins at it with some paint-pens and glue and tissue paper?

Smash it to smithereens?

Egad I just hate this lamp so much. *whine* *sigh*

FINISHED! (mostly)

Have a look at this!

so there it is, all finished and set and all that remains is framing it up properly and hanging it.

It's 30x30 right now - and this is the first time we've been able to hold it up to a window and see it all together with good light coming from behind. It is going to hang in a window that will be similarly lit to what you see here, but for a few hours in the late afternoon it's going to get full full sunshine and will appear far far brighter.

again, these are the rules I set for myself in this window:

1) straight lines
2) big pieces
3) only use scrap and leftover glass (thereby including glass exhumed out of old church windows as well as glass remaining from the creation of other church/private home windows)

additionally, we wanted it to be a "blue" window without being overwhelmingly syrupy and then to make it interesting my mother and I put that bolt of light square in the middle of it and frankly I think we couldn't have done a better job.

Next up is the mate to this window which will go in greens as opposed to blues. The "ray" of light will go a different direction, (up in stead of down) and the glass will likely be a little darker but the first three rules will still apply. I'll inlcude the finished installation pictures as soon as they are available.

YAY! Something finished! (MOSTLY)

oh yeah

and also... what's this? something finished?

well not quite, but all the glass is cut and in place and now all that remains is soldering it together, framing it up proper-like and then hangning the dern thing in the sun and finding out what it REALLY looks like!

*fingers crossed*

Another LONG Pause

Dang I'm not any good at this "regular updates" business.

Be that as it may, I HAVE UPDATES!

Where to begin? Well, let's start with the reason most of you read this... wedding information! YAY! Okay, so we have a DATE picked out and etched in stone (so help me) and publishable and printable and tell-everyone-able. The Main Squeeze and I will be tying the knot this year on October 18th. Kindof an arbitrary day, no real reason or magic to the numbers. If you read something nice about it though, do tell me. Like if that's the day Mars turns green and the house of Plymfoozle kneels to the fourth house of the sun for another four weeks of leather hotpants or something, I'm down with that.

So yeah, we have a date. ALSO we have a location! HUZZAH! I'm sure you can scroll downish and see that I was so feverishly upon yonder fence about locations alpha and beta. Well wouldn't you know it I found THE best location just a block away from alpha and I shall now announce that it will be referred to as location... erm... delta. Because Delta is something like math-speak for change. yeah. dig it.

Location Delta has all the romance AND ease of use of both of the other options combined with the added perk that it's a Bed and Breakfast that YOU, gentle reader, can stay at for the night before and the night of the big event! Sound EXCITING? EXHILLERATING? The best part is that we are contracted into only seven rooms out of the whole property so those fill up quick with family and the rest of the rooms can be booked or not booked as my guests see fit. No con games. No guilt trips. No begging for already tight budgets to go an extra 500 miles on TOP of a schmantzy resort room. Neat, eh? In time I'll consider putting up the actual link, but I'm not sure I'm ready yet for my slavering stalkers out there (all none of you) to start pencilling my data into their calendars. If you want the link, email me and I"ll hook ya'z up. And you know, look for the info in your invitations and whatnot. Lord, the whatnot. I'll worry about that later.
So that's cool, henh? Two big chunks of information for ya.

The temp job is going well. It's robotic, and mind-bendingly dull but it's a job and it pays the mortgage so I'm not complaining. Full Breakfast Fridays also help to gloss over the 40 hours of business-casual brain-draining. And, for the record - can I just say something about business casual?
It so totally sucks. Whatever ranks above it, more formal than B.C. sucks-eth even moreth, but b.c. as it is is just a big bucket of suck. My body is not built for button-front blouses or poly-blend pants. It's just not... and certainly not on THIS budget. The tops fit... barely... and gods forbid I need to raise my arms above my head or BLAM there goes that button and suddenly I'm all Fredrick's of Hollywood again. And the pants?! My GODS what is with those pants? What the hell is with those two snooty little silvery rabbit teeth that hold my pants closed? DAMN THOSE RABBIT TEETH! First of all, I can't see them. Sorry folks, the ginormous cans are in the way and gods help me but there's just no way to go to the bathroom and put everything back together without a mirror because do those wicked little designers put them on straight? NOOOO they don't. Do they make them so that you can tactile-ly sortof sense when they're like, latched? NOOO they don't. And my favorite design flaw is that there are always two if not more, so even if I"m lucky enough to get one of them in right, I have to essentially undo it again to catch the other little fucker. So if someone from my work is reading this and they go into the ladies room and hears a snarl of colorful swears... that's me trying to do up my go-ram pants already.

Go-ram. you get that? it's terminology from Firefly. Great series. I gnash my teeth at the execs that killed it after one season and whole-heartedly encourage anyone unfamiliar with it to go see it now. Right now. Thank me in the comments. It's space, it's cowboys, it's hot chicks and manly men... gods it has it all. And yes... I'm a tree-mendous nerd but don't let that stop you from skidoodling out that door right now to go buy yourself a copy of the full first season of Firefly. Joss Whedon. I need not say more.

So that's it... except wait! What's that picture? OH! I've been busy with the glass, too, after all of this. See how far we've come? I am just DYING to see what this is gonna look like all finished.
Couldn't you just DIE?!?!?!

Happy Monday!

Glass

So I went up to the mountains again, and there's no need to brace yourself for another 8 pages of insane ramblings about what I think about when I'm locked in my car with myself. Instead, how about some pictures of what it is I'm actually doing up there?! YEAH!

The planning stage for this kind of window was simple. The objectives are:

1) cover the high window in my dining room so the cat won't go in there again

2) use only "leftover glass" that's in my mother's studio, no sneaky buying anything

3) use blue glass that will let lots of light in, and don't let it turn into some sixties psychadelic mess.

easy enough, right?

So we took those objectives, found some awesome blues and laid out the following plan on the dining room table.

You see there we have mostly dark blues and purples up at the top, and lots of wibbly glass, and then a kindof stripe of warmer yellows and earthy tones in a stripe down the middle. Good, now that we have a plan (and a size-range) we decide that insted of foiling each piece, it'll be leaded. Simpler to assemble but probably heavier at the end. No worries. Mmm. Lead. So then all that was left was to move it all to an assembly board in the studio. We started on the upper right hand corner and are building out right to left, top to bottom... roughly.

This is where we are now. You can see we have the pieces in the upper right cut and they all fit nicely into the lead. Notice the "ray of light" has a warmer toned metal to it, that is brass which is more sturdy than regular lead and will give the finished product an enormous amount of stability. The last thing we want is this thing to start sagging and come crashing down on us from 20 feet above our heads!

Also maybe you can see the marbles in the ray, there's a thin stripe across the whole top third up there that we are making purposefully uber-transparent. My mother used her glass kiln to melt some very clear pastelly marbles together for that triangle. Should be a pretty awesome effect when it's all finished.

Finally, you can see that the rest of it is still laid out and we're developing the look. It seems to be turning into a VERY loosely interpreted landscape, with darker swirly blues at the top and bluesy greensy colors at the bottom. Don't think I'm getting religious on you now, that streak of light in the middle can be whatever you want it to be. It could be a divine ray of inspiration coming to earth, or it could also be the pathway to the world of the gods, or it could be a very nice colorado beam of sunlight cutting through a lovely blue colorado day (rife with unpredictable weather patterns and junk). You make it what you want, it's stained glass so it's supposed to be that way. For me though, it changes every time I work on it so we'll have to see how it strikes me when it's done. Likely it will mean something entirely different each time I look at it depending on how much light is hitting it and when. Really that's the best thing to hope for with a window like this.

So anyway, this is what I do when I sneak away into the mountains trying to escape the house-crazies. It's awesomely theraputic, wildly slow and frustrating, and I just feel so so lucky to be able to do something like this with my mom. How cool is that? you know?

I'll leave you with some nifty details that I'm just in love with:

That spot where the silver pins are is a deliberately open space we're going to leave, I just love the dribbly edge of the glass and think it will look stunning with just empty air beneath it. The blue is a strong and deep cobalt, so the effect should be pretty dramatic. (the pins will hold it in place until we can stuff up the lead with solder on the ends there...)

I'm going to try to repeat that dribbly edge in at least two more places in the window - one will be a melting-candle-wax look inside the ray of light (in a super streaky white) and one will likely be a hilly-looking green toward the bottom left.

I'm sure you're just dying to see what this looks like finished and installed, and so am I. So stay tuned! Incidentally, yes, I have cut myself twice doing this and it's pretty funny to realize that I used to react with the standard inhaled "hhhhh" and panic and GAH!WOUNDED! but now I just go "oops, that's gonna bleed" and soldier off to clean/seal up the wound so that I can keep working. Funny how we get used to junk like that. And yet - slice my finger open on a manilla folder and I'm likely done for the day. bleargh.