Days 4, 5 and 6

I had a blog all ready to post Saturday... no internet wi-fi at The Factory and home internet on the fritz. I love technology... when it works. There is something about losing your internet connections to make you feel completely disconnected from the world. Machines have taken over our lives... we rely too much on the convenience they provide us.

Each day as the piece comes together, more and more people stop to take a look. The windows are coming along nicely. Although not nearly as quickly as I had thought they would. There are a total of 284 pieces of glass in these windows, I'm averaging about 16 pieces a day. And that's just cutting them... then they have to be foiled. Foiling can be done anywhere anytime, which is a good thing. I think I'll start bringing home some pieces to foil in the evening.

Day 3; The Prescott Windows

Today was a much better day! I stopped by Target on my way into the studio and picked up an adjustable arm desk lamp to put on my work table. The added light really helped me keep my cutter on the right side of the line.

I was able to get several blue and green pieces cut. The green glass was being a little persnickety. Not breaking where I scored it. Some glass is like that. Hopefully it was just that sheet and the rest of the green I bought will behave. I only had to re-cut one piece. There are a lot of little blue pieces that fit in between the flower petals. Those little pieces take just as much time as the big pieces but don’t show as much progress. I feel really good about what I was able to accomplish today.

Tomorrow is Friday, so I don’t have to work at the rec center at all (yea!)… plan on heading in early and getting a good jump start. I do need to work on a repair for another customer… we’ve been waiting on a custom bevel piece to come in from California. It’s finally arrived, so I need to bang that out. Shouldn’t take too long.

The Prescott Windows; Day 2

I’m sure my students will secretly delight in the fact that my glass cutting skills today were off kilter! For some odd reason, I could not hit the mark and spent far more time at the grinder than I prefer. (Those in the glass crafting know, who know me, know I HATE grinding!) A few of the pieces still need a little tweaking but they will fit in just fine. If not, I’ll recut them. This lack of cutting prowess made my progress today less than desired. Tomorrow is a new day and hopefully a little wine and a good night sleep will restore my normally accurate cutting abilities.

You’ll notice that I’m still avoiding cutting anything around the hummingbird. I'll get to him soon enough. I cut some of the green and blue toward the center (right side of the left panel), the other coneflower in this panel and the petals of the yellow daisy. I am loving all the colors in this project! They are showing up pretty vibrant in the pictures, laying flat against a white piece of paper makes them more two dimensional and darker than they will actually look with air and light behind them.

The Prescott Windows - Day 1

Construction began today on the left side of the Prescott windows. I’m sure the Prescott’s are getting anxious to see them complete, as am I. The design and glass choices took about 30 days, which is pretty good considering the pattern is an original design and was drawn out by hand. The Prescott’s have been great to work with… I hope I can exceed their expectations!

The pattern preparation took an hour and half. I checked and double checked the measurements. One of my biggest fears is to attempt an installation and the piece not fit into the opening! Pattern preparation is kind of like painting a room… the prep work is tedious but necessary! There are two patterns, one to use for transferring the individual pattern pieces to the glass and the second to lay out the cut pieces.

The rest of the afternoon was spent cutting glass. There was, of course, the occasional potty break and the 3:15 walk down to Frisky Berry for a cup of coffee to keep me going! I didn’t get as much cut as I had hoped. Wednesday should be a good, productive day.

For some reason, I cannot get a handle on the color of the hummingbird. I asked Chris at Armstrong Glass his opinion and the bird you see in the picture were the colors he suggested. I’m going to cut it again with the color I had been thinking of previously. I’ll let the Prescott’s take a look at it before it is soldered together and let them decide which color combo to go with. We’ll see how it looks when all the other colors are around it. It can always be changed. I love the colors as they are now, just not sure how they’ll look with the blue background and green leaves.

Boring studio news

The studio is finally coming together. The first big order from Art Glass House came in last Thursday and it was like Christmas! Lots of glass and supplies! The pony case of Kokomo glass was a welcome surprise... there were no more than 2 pieces of the same glass and they were all beautiful. There were even a few pieces I'm not sure I want to part with!

A new marketing tool

I was told recently that to successfully market your business, you need to be spending 50% of the time you have marketing. That seems a little excessive, but did get me to thinking that I need to spend more time getting the word out there about Sapphire Road Stained Glass.