Glassworks: Discovery

Friends of mine got married this weekend.  It was a beautiful ceremony, intimate with a small party of attendees.  The weather was perfect and setting fantastic.  A cathedral of palms and oaks in a sinkhole turned botanical garden decades ago.  

  The bride and groom are space enthusiasts.  Both wanted to be astronauts long before they met each other.  Both turned instead from studying the stars to studying the earth, and met at a geology field camp.  Studying this one celestial body would, for the time being, take the place of studying the others.  But neither lost their love of the stars.

  So on the day she called me, to say he'd proposed, I knew what they would be getting for their gift.  

  At the time, the shuttle program was still going strong.  The International Space Station was still under construction.  There was talk of going to Mars one day.  And even though the shuttles have now been retired, it still seemed like the right thing to do.

  I've been doing stained glass since high school.  Over the years I've collected a number of tools of the trade: a grinder, special pliers, a cutting board designed to trap glass splinters as the pieces break, even a "foiling table" for wrapping the edges of the glass in copper foil, my preferred stain glass method.  All of this I have on a work bench set up out in the garage.

  I got a late start.  They announced the date about a year ago, but I procrastinated.  Edward looked at me at the end of January and said, "You're running out of time".  Neither of us were sure I had enough time left to finish it.

  I started with a coloring book drawing of the shuttle on the crawler I found on the web. The perspective was off and the details weren't quite right, but it was enough of a basis to start the design.  I did the initial design line work in Illustrator, but then I moved to GlassEye 2000, a wonderful stained glass design program Edward got me about 10 years ago.  It allows you to color the pieces with real samples of glass.  As it turned out, I had most of the glass I needed.  The only color I had to buy was the blue for the sky and some yellow of the rockets.





  It only took four hours to cut out the whole panel, and only one piece didn't break right the first time.  I ended up changing the color of the rocket flames and exhaust, because I didn't like the glass I choose at first.  But after that it was on to the grinding. The first cut is always rough and it ends up looking like there are lots of gaps.  After the grinding, things fit together a lot better.  

  Next comes the foil.  Instead of using lead between my pieces, I use the copper foil method.  You wrap each piece in copper foil tape, which is sticky on one side.  Then you rub, or burnish, the foil to make lie smoothly on the glass.  You can get much finer detail using copper foil.  The pieces can be smaller, letting your design be finer.  I can usually bring the glass inside at this point doing the foiling and burnishing while watching TV.  There is only problem:  as the backing comes off the copper tape, I often get help of the four legged variety.  The girls think the tape backing it there just for their amusement, and their swats and tugs aren't always helpful. 

  Once all the pieces have been foiled, the panel was soldered together.  The solder is a 60%40% lead/tin solder.  I usually masking tape all the pieces together, making sure the final fit is what I want it to be.  Each seam is brushed with flux and the foil is "tinned".  Tinning coats the copper with a thin layer of solder and makes the finishing go more smoothly.  It also joins all the pieces together as a whole for the first time.  The trick next is to form an "I-beam" of solder over each foil seam.  If you're not careful, you'll melt the solder clear through to the other side and end up with a pool of cooled solder.  This usually takes a couple of passes to do, and I flipped the panel from front to back to cover all the seems and check how things look.  Then I washed it, and as is always the case, ended up back out in the garage, touching up this seam or that until I was happy with the way it looked.  

  Once the soldering was finished, I patina-ed the solder.  I used a "black" patina on this piece, which turns the solder a dark gray.  The patina dulls the seams so they don't distract from the glass.  Then applied a coat of glass polish, so that the soldered seams would stay bright.  For this panel, I found a store bought frame to use.  Part of the design, in this case, was to make it to fit in the frame I found.  Once it was built, though, I still had to figure out how to mount it in the frame.  The solution was to buy half inch quarter round moulding at Home Depot.  I used the shop at work to miter the corners and trim one edge of the molding.  A little sanding and some black paint was all it took.  I was very happy with the results.

  The final step was to sign the panel before screwing down the molding.   It took 5 weeks to finish from design to finish.  I didn't work on it every day, I didn't have to.  The progress was quick and went smoothly, even with the problem of figuring out how to mount it in the frame.    I signed it:  "Discovery  Monroe '12"   Because marriage is a journey of Discovery.  And for these two, I can think of no better ship to travel on.

 To Heather and Trent:  All the best.