Heart of Glass

Captain Laird and I had a lovely outing together, just the two of us, last weekend. Doesn't happen often these days. Our destination? Baywater again- that's where just about everything for this house comes from!

This time we were into the lair of our leadlight master, Rick. Rick led us through into his workshop, strangely reminiscent of Year 7 Woodwork but no pine pencil boxes here. This is the heart of glass.

The walls are lined with rack upon rack of coloured, clear and textured glasses waiting to be hand selected for new windows and restoration projects. Works in progress are dotted around, along with great scrolls of hand drawn designs.

Our challenge on this day was to review our actual-size drawings and begin the process of choosing every little piece of colour destined to go into our Victorian-style lead light.

First lesson: what looks good small can end up looking like twin alien heads at full-size.

Having solved that little faux pas, we spent the next hour or so working on our best mental visualisation skills. It was hard for my little worn out brain to hold the image in my mind and then add in colours and try to imagine how it would look in different lights and at different times of the day. There were three of us working on it, and it certainly did take that much brain power to work it through, adjusting the design in places as we went.

The photo below shows the general tones going into our design. It's not a great photo - doesn't really show the colours that well and the shaky shot was taken late in the consultation when I clearly was on the brink of mental collapse (not to mention hungry). Tones are a mix of deep royal blue, violets, light lavenders, and textured clear glass.

I think it will be beautiful.