Inspiration

This afternoon I took a trip up to New Hampshire to visit a stained glass maker’s shop. He sells a huge variety of glass and I needed some. But I also wanted to browse patterns and see his work. I’ve heard a lot about it. He’s been making stained glass for 33 years and most of his work is on commission basis now. He makes beautiful windows. His great pride and joy is built into his studio and it’s about 5 feet high and 4 feet wide. It’s a tree of life in the most beautiful shades of greens and reds and ambers and browns. I have never seen anything quite like it before. He said he designed it himself and it took him about 11 months to make it. The detail was incredible. I asked if anyone has ever offered a tempting price to take it off his hands—he said that yes, indeed, he’d been recently offered $18,000 for it, but he just can’t let it go. His studio was an inspiration. And he answered a lot of my questions and gave me a guided tour of his glass supplies, explaining the merits and disadvantages of each. Some are definitely not for the beginner.

I told him that I’m working on my first piece and it doesn’t look all that hot. He said, “My first piece was horrible. Want to see it?”

Heck, yeah!

He has it hanging above his work table for the days when he feels discouraged about a project. Well, seeing it made me feel pretty good. It was crooked and lumpy. There is hope!

So now I have new glass and I’m going to change my project colors a little bit. I think it’ll look better. And I have a lot of patterns to look through in the next week before I have to decide on my individual project for class.

I really should have taken a class ages ago when I first became interested in stained glass. There is so much to learn. I want to be able to make beautiful things, too.

Oh and I should probably also note that my sense of direction is as thoroughly screwed up as ever. Getting to the shop was easy and took about twenty minutes...the directions he gave me were excellent. Reversing them to go home was not so easy because I don’t recognize the landmarks yet. I wound up touring through a lot of New Hampshire and Massachusetts countryside before I finally found a road going east. I can’t go wrong there. It worked, eventually. Two hours later. But I had the opportunity to enjoy a lot of colorful fall foliage—with my camera still sitting on my desk at home.