Been working so hard on my new stained-glass piece that it’s cutting into sleep time, so bear with me if my wit and charm aren’t up to their usual levels. (There’s a joke in there somewhere, concerning my usual levels of wit and charm, I’m sure of it.)My body took enough abuse from me over the years and finally got fed up with the crap… where I once use to survive on 4-5 hours of sleep, caffeine, alcohol, taekwondo, and ramen noodles, now I need a full 9-10 and a fresh fruit smoothie in the morning or my whole life is out of whack. lol. I suppose that is my penance for my formative years.

This is the piece that has had me up past midnight on two consecutive days:

Sure doesn’t look like something to lose sleep over yet, does it? Consider though, that “cutting” glass isn’t like cutting wood… you don’t just mark your line and saw away. In fact there really isn’t any cutting at all… technically you’re just trying to control the way the glass breaks by scoring and then snapping it. Then you grind down the edges and try to get as close a fit as possible to the next piece. Each of the two dozen or so pieces you see there took 5-6 “cuts” each, so you can see how the time would add up.

This piece needs to be done tonight, but in a stroke of luck today is going to end up being one of my rare “half days” at work. Some people take off work for vacation… I take of work to sit at home for the afternoon and wait for the refrigerator repair man to show up. Woohoo. I’m not complaining though, it will give me ample time to work on my tree there, so that eventually it will look something like this on:

I still need to clean up and patina the joints… they’ll be black when it’s all said and done. I’m not real thrilled with the design of this, but it was a practice piece, and my first, so I kind of just drew it up and went with it. (I’m not really a “flower” person, unless they are growing in my garden, but I’m thinking I can pawn this off onto one of my friends/family who is.)

Neo is a huge stained glass critic and he says “Eh, so-so.”

UPDATE: Well, I got it done enough…

A dozen more pieces to foil, and…

Ta-da!

In retrospect I wish I would have just used one color  piece of glass for the background… I was going for the sunset look, but I think there would have to be more pieces involved to mix and match the glass like this and make it word. Still, not half bad for my second piece.