Thursday, January 28, 2010

Stained-glass Crosses

We had a great time in my stained-glass class making little panels of a cross.

There are several steps in creating a stained-glass piece. There are also many tools required.


First, you choose the pattern, copy it, and cut out one of the copies to use as a pattern.

After tracing around the pattern onto your glass, you cut the glass with a glass cutter.


You leave a little space for the lead, so cut your glass INSIDE the line you drew. Each piece of glass needs to be the EXACT size of the pattern. Too big and it won't fit. It will push the other pieces out too far or just won't go in at all. Too small and you'll have a gap in your finished piece.

You put your glass together on a board that has two boards on top at a right angle. You use these boards to push against as you put the pieces of glass in place. The pattern is there so you know where everything goes.

The outside of the panel is zinc. Lead stretches and is very soft, so it doesn't make a good border. We cut the zinc channels at a 45 degree angel.

Here is a piece with most of the glass in place. The nails are there to hold it together until after the solder is added. You put them in as you go along then move them when you are ready to put another piece in. This is especially important with curved pieces (in a different pattern) because they move around a lot when you put new pieces in.

Here you can see that piece number 12 is the only one not in. We number the pieces so we are sure they go in the correct place. This is more important in a larger piece but is still helpful even in a small panel like these.

After all the lead and pieces of glass are in you put some flux on each joint. 'The joints are where the lead meets up against another piece of lead. The solder won't stick to the lead unless you put flux on it. There's some sort of chemical reaction that you can google if you really need to know more about how that works.

The soldering irons are REALLY hot, so make sure you only touch the handle. You use just enough solder to cover the joint. Go straight down and straight up for a pretty solder joint. DON'T Paint it on. Down and up - that's it. We wear masks because it's really not good to breath the flux fumes. For that matter, the lead is rather hazardous too! Please don't eat it.

After all of your joints are soldered you remove your nails, flip the piece over and do the same thing to the other side.

After soldering it's good to wash off the flux just to make sure it doesn't keep reacting with the lead and make ugly spots. This may not be as necessary because when the piece is cleaned a little later that may take care of it, but this makes sure all the flux is gone.

The next step is called "mudding." The "mud" is actually window glazing like you would use on an old wooden window sash around the glass. The mud makes the window air-tight and water-tight and keeps the glass from rattling around in the lead.

I'm not sure what "whiting" is, but it cleans up the glass and makes it shine beautifully and it dries up the mud. You sprinkle it on the glass then scrub it with a brush.
A final brushing off with a soft cloth and you have your finished window.


BEAUTIFUL!

You can see more of the finished crosses from my class on my facebook page.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Fellow Artist's Blogs

You may have noticed a list of blogs over there on the right side of my blog. These are blogs from fellow artists who are a part of the VAST team on Etsy. VAST stands for Visual Artist Street Team. You'll find some great art and art information as well as some nice personal information about a lot of great artists by following the links. They are sorted by who posted last. Come back often and check the links to see the latest from the VAST team.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

A Test Post

I edited the html in my template to try to add a follow me on Twitter button. This is a test post to see if it worked.

Facebook Fans and Twitter

A few weeks ago I remade my facebook page for Bear Hollow Creations. It's pretty exciting to see that I have 305 fans!

Today I made a tiny url and I picked out the end part myself so it fits my page

http://tinyurl.com/bhc-fbpage

I hope to pick up a few page fans by posting it here.

You can also follow me on Twitter.


http://twitter.com/LyndelLittleton

I need to find out how to make those little buttons to put on your posts. Anyone know how?

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Free Day at the Frist



Free Community Day at the Frist
Mon, Jan 18. Frist Center for the Visual Arts. 919 Broadway. 244-3340. 10 am - 5:30 pm. Free day at the Frist in honor of Martin Luther King Day! Click here for a list of exhibits on display.

If you live in or near Nashville you should take advantage of this great offer and take your family or friends with you and enjoy some great art.


"Georgia O'Keeffe and Her Times" and "Thomas Hart Benton in story and song" are two of the exhibits right now.