Day 20: Never have I ever… made stained glass art.

Pinned to the painting: dozens of
cards from flowers she's received.
Most were from her second husband, Ben,
with sentiments like "You're my darling."
The funniest?"Edie, I never called you STUPID."
Ah, marriage. 

This is a self-portrait of my grandmother. Edie. Artist. She is the most diversely creative person I have ever met in real life. Painting, pastels, charcoal, collage, photography, textiles, even film—she’s explored almost every possible medium with which to express her art. But perhaps her greatest love is working with stained glass. I never asked her what she loves about glass so much… but I’d guess that it's partly the treasure hunt. You can mix any paint hue. But you have to find the right piece of glass. Color, texture, thickness, transparency; it was all about finding the perfection-combination to make her vision a reality. I have vivid childhood memories in her studio…. she’d hold up a pristine, thin slab of glass and declare “Look at this glass against the light. Isn’t the color just wondaahful?” She loves glass.

These are two of her lovely works.

Glass window of my childhood home.     Butterflies are the signature Edie motif. 

Sadly, Edie isn’t in the studio any more. After 80+ years of artistic fuel, she is no longer of body or mind to do the work that she loved so much. And one of the cruelties of life is that you never know when it’s going to be your last day in the studio. She didn’t. So, for the past few years, there has been a half-finished lamp just sitting on her studio’s worktable. It stares at me sadly every time I visit her. It begs to be finished. I shut the door and tell it to be quiet. I don’t know how to do stained glass. 

But now with some more free time on my hands, I thought, hey… maybe I could learn how to do stained glass? So I watched a BUNCH of online videos. It looked like a manageable process, but I knew that this was a craft that had held my grandmother’s attention for a lifetime; it couldn’t be easy. But I would try. 

Lamp, inspired by the Hearst Building   The lamp, unfinished view.

I headed out to Long Island to spend the day in my grandmother’s studio. After a bedside visit with her, I went down to the studio, put on my Pandora Mozart station to really get into the EdieZone, and began to dust off the work station. The studio was in bad shape after years of neglect. It took me about 90 minutes to get things in order, find the right supplies, and take stock of the lamp’s current state. The lamp is actually in decent shape. It needs the fourth panel finished, and then joined to the other three. The connecting joint pieces also need to be soldered into place. 

Luckily, about 98% of the pieces were already cut by Edie years ago. And I need no practice cutting stained glass anyway, thanks to an ill-fated attempt at a glass mosaic table that lived, unfinished, in my parents’ basement for about, oh, 7 years. I cut about 300 pieces of glass for that project before letting it fall to the wayside. (And somewhere, my dad is shaking his head as he reads this…) Cutting glass isn’t really hard. You just score it with a glass cutter, hold it with glass pliers, and apply some pressure. Snap. Glass is cut. I cut a few triangles with ease, just to make sure I still had it. 

Next up, the glass pieces need to be wrapped with copper foil. This looked so easy on the video! It wasn’t. The thin foil curls and sticks to itself, and it’s nearly impossible to perfectly center it over an even thinner piece of glass. It takes some real finesse. After wrapping, the copper foil must be burnished down on all sides with a notched tool. This wasn’t hard, just laborious. She did this for every single piece for every window or lamp she ever did?  Yikes.

Blurry shot of my fresh solder

Next I laid the wrapped piece beside the half-completed panel. It was time for the tricky part: soldering. I heated up the solder iron. Before you solder the pieces together, a thin coat of flux must be applied to the copper foil. Flux is a chemical compound that is inert at room temp, but once heated becomes highly reductive and allows the tin-lead solder to fuse to the copper wrapped pieces. It's basically stained glass glue. I fluxed the joint with a paintbrush and then cut a piece of solder wire slightly larger than the joint to be soldered. First step is to “tin the tip” which means melting a little starter layer of solder on the tip of the iron. 

Whoa, Nelly! This stuff melts in a hot second, literally! I knew that the tin-lead solder had a low melting point, but I didn’t expect the metal to go molten the second it touched the hot iron. Ok, ok. It’s only melted, scalding metal. It will only give me 3^rd degree burns if I have a little slip-up. No bigs. I really wanted to touch this shiny fluid. How hot was it? I felt like Smeagol; the glistening solder was my ring. I'm sure I could touch it... just one little touch... it wouldn't hurt that badly, would it? I was too chicken, and decided some mysteries are best left unknown. I delicately ran the soldering iron up the joint, leading the metallic liquid into the crevasse as I went.  It produced a shiny, beautiful ridge. It was very gratifying.

I repeated a few more wraps and joints and then decided to go up and visit with Edie some more. Her eyesight is poor and her hearing is gone, along with most of her memory. It’s a good visit if we have few simple exchanges. So we just sit together, mostly. I so badly wanted to talk to about the project. I wanted to ask her how long it took to complete her various works, why the flux didn’t take on one spot, how on earth she made these complicated jigsaw puzzles of glass work?! Then, I wanted to punch myself in the face for not asking her all of this while she was still able to tell me. 

Results: I made some serious progress on my learning curve, and I gained a serious appreciation for the patience, skill, vision and detail required for this art. Looking around my grandmother’s home, filled with stained glass pieces in every room, and thinking about all of her works that grace the homes of our family, friends, and the massive glass installation she completed in her local library, I almost cannot believe the thousands of woman-hours that Edie has devoted to her great love. That's a LOT of copper foil. 

Though I didn’t get too far on the project this time, I think I might be able to actually finish her lamp. She might not get it, she might not even remember starting the lamp. But on some level, I think she’ll be happy that I’m trying.

Status: A good starter success.