May 19 - An Artistic Crash and Burn

Yesterday was such a humbling defeat. Ohhhhhhh crash and burn.....

As I said in the past few days I started working on my first real stained glass panel (as opposed to glass mosaic) since being back in the US. It went real well at first -- nice modern design, good glass cutting, good first stage of soldering.

But then I got to a point where I wanted to do a very simple clear border with lead, something I'd done on another project back in France with no difficulty whatsoever. But as I wrote about two days ago I couldn't buy the lead that I usually use. So I bought the type of lead available and tried to make do.

Well, to make a long story short I bungled it big time. This lead I bought had none of the properties that it was supposed to -- flexible, malleable, easy-to-cut. Hell, we don't work with a highly toxic substance just for fun. We use lead because no other metal has the same physical properties as lead. End of story. This was everything lead should NOT be -- rigid, hard to cut, unforgiving. I couldn't use it. It messed up my plans. So I had to use soldering technique #2, which is something called the Tiffany foil technique. And in doing this I made a real mess because it should have been planned for from the start, which I did not do and it turned into a pile of solder slop.

So now my panel looks pretty from a distance but is a true horror of bad soldering close up. It's like a gorgeous blond who turns and flashes a rotten toothy smile. I shudder. Monsieur Andrieux, my instructor, would have had a fit if he saw this monstrosity.

Anyway here's a picture of it from a distance. Like I said, don't be fooled, she's a real beast close up. The problem is the ring connecting the blue/green glass and the clear glass. And it's a hasty photo with mediocre lighting.