Saturday, September 12, 2009

Its been kinda froggy for the past few days

I've been wanting to redo this frog/dragonfly suncatcher for the longest time. I designed it last year and built just one of them, but there were things about the pattern that I wanted to make changes to before I'd build another. Finally, I sat down and figured out what was bothering me and got things straightened out.
A few days ago, I got started on the process. I made my carbon copy of the original and started picking out glass. Right about this time, my neighbor came over to drop off a loaf of bread his wife had made. He saw what I was working on and bought it for her as a surprise Christmas gift. Wonderful for me, I won't have to take a million and one photos to get five right like I would if I posted this suncatcher to my Etsy site.

These are most all of the glass pieces that are going into the suncatcher. I've glued down the paper pattern pieces to the glass. I'll save the pieces that are cut off and sort them by color. One of these days I'm going to give mosaics a try.


The pieces have been thinned down a bit--here's how they look after I've cut them by hand with a glass cutter. Some of the angles of these pieces are a bit tight and the type of glass is not all that easy to cut by hand~I'll leave these for the glass saw. Since I don't have any extra of some of this glass I don't want to take the chance of trying to cut it by hand and having it break in the wrong place.

Here are the glass pieces cleaned up a bit more with the glass saw. Its a wonderful tool~I use it quite often. A must have in my shop.

I started grinding the pieces for the frog first. The eye is a black glass glob that I've grinded down on both sides and also the bottom to make it a bit shorter so it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. I like the idea of using a glob--or glass gem, since its round it has a certain amount of reflectivity in that it catched the light and reflects it. This spotted glass is wonderful for frogs. I'm so glad I came across a piece of it years ago in the scrap bin of the stained glass shop that I took my one and only class at.

Here's the detail of the dragonfly. I've used a light green glass glob for its head. This one I couldn't grind the bottom of since it will show--it will look all scratched up and dull. So, this will stick up above the rest of the glass pieces a bit. The wings are an iridescent textured glass with the textured side up and the body is 7 individual pieces in light green.

Here's how things look as of this afternoon. Next, I'll wrap all of the pieces with copper foil, solder the front and the back and wrap lead came around the entire piece. I'll solder two loops near the top of the piece for a chain to be attached and I'll darken all of the solder lines and lead with black patina.
I'm always excited to get a project like this done. I'll post photos again as the process continues.






5 comments:

Celtic Cat said...

Lovely new glasswork!

Ilove frogs and dragonflies!

Celtic Cat said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Diana P. said...

Not only is that impressive but it's really beautiful. I love it even more because I love dragonflies!

Desert Rose Art Glass said...

Looks like this will be another beautiful and unique piece of stained glass -- I use the same green colored glass for my prickly pear cacti.

livingglassart said...

Thanks so much for all the kind words. I love dragonflies, too~by getting out and finding them in RL its helped me to make the changes to this one that I wanted to make.