APolymath

Be Curious, Be Creative, Be Kind

Stained Glass

I dabbled with stained glass one summer when I was a kid. I remember the sound of the gas been scored and the way the solder pooled and melted. It took a few decades to come back to it.

When I did pick it up again, I wasn’t starting from zero. I had repaired a few windows and made some picture frames, so cutting glass wasn’t foreign. I was comfortable with a soldering iron from exploring electronics work. While I was doing blacksmithing demonstration at the museum, people would ask about the other mediums I worked with and I found my self coveting getting into stained glass. I tend to start getting obsessed with learning new skills till I have to give in and jump in the deep end.

I had been building geometric/polyhedra lights in modular origami for years, but paper is fragile. I wanted something that had the same geometry, the same interplay of angles and planes, but something more substantial. My first stained glass project was a stellated octahedron built from leftover window glass and plumbing solder with the bare minimum of tools as a proof of concept. I was pretty happy with how it turned out, so I upgraded my tools and kept exploring.

I’m pulled towards three-dimensional work, lamps especially, where you are coaxing a flat material into suggesting depth and roundness and volume that isn’t really there.

My process tends to run in batches. I’ll spend a whole day cutting, another day grinding, another foiling, another soldering, often across several projects at the same time. Lead-free solder requires more heat than traditional solder, and more heat means more cracked glass, usually right near the end of a project. I’m still working on my cut lines so I have less grinding to do.

Some of my future goals and projects; A life-sized glass chicken lamp. A kaleidoscope projector. Lamp designs that make changing a bulb less of an ordeal. Origami recreated in glass. Geometric forms that combine stained glass and blacksmithing in ways I haven’t fully figured out yet. This page is where I document all of it, the finished pieces, the experiments, the things that worked and the things that taught me something by not working. Have a look around.

I work in Tiffany-style copper foil technique and use only lead-free products throughout.







Some of my work for sale on etsy.

Photos of some of my work.