Kicking Glass: A Creative Guide to Stained Glass Craft

By Neile Cooper

Creative and practical, Kicking Glass is a step-by-step guide for those wanting to practice the popular craft of stained glass.

From simple suncatchers and boho lamps to exquisite 3D constructions and delicately-poised glass butterflies, experienced artist Neile Cooper guides you through the magical world of stained glass with a creative handbook for both the novice and more experienced crafter alike.

Beautifully illustrated with photographs of Neile's own work including her glorious glass cabin in the woods as well as pieces from some of today's most stylish designers, Kicking Glass is packed with ideas to guide and inspire.

This book provides comprehensive technical instruction in the copper foil method, covering everything from tools and supplies to exploratory techniques such as including foraged and found objects into your work. Skills are demonstrated through tutorials with photos, instructional drawings and 16 stunning patterns. Whether you're looking to decorate your windows, create lovely gifts for friends and family or design your own epic masterpiece, Kicking Glass is the essential modern guide to stained glass making.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: May 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781789940503

Neile Cooper

Crafting stained glass has been Neile Cooper's job and passion for over 20 years. Based in Sparta, New Jersey, USA, she has created everything from jewelry and tiny boxes to large-scale win­dow installations. In 2015 Neile began creating her stained glass cabin in the woods, a small sanctuary clad entirely in reclaimed window frames filled with her stained glass. She is an experienced educator and gives regular tutorials and workshops.

Book preview

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

STUDIO SETUP & SAFETY

TOOLS & SUPPLIES

GLASS

CUTTING GLASS

USING PATTERNS

FOILING

LAYOUT

SOLDERING

FINISHING

CLEAN, PATINA, & POLISH

DESIGNING PATTERNS

SUNCATCHERS

1 FIRST FEATHER

2 ROSE QUARTZ

3 PINK MOON

4 CATENARY

5 WISP OF A WING

6 HONEYCOMB CLUSTER

7 KATONAH MOTH

FOUND & FORAGED

INCORPORATING CURIOS

PRESSED EPHEMERA

JEWELRY

8 PRESSED FLOWER POSY

9 PEACOCK FEATHER SUNCATCHER

10 COMET MOTH

11 OYSTERS ON ASPEN

3D CONSTRUCTION

3D SOLDERING TECHNIQUES

12 BASIC BOX

13 BUTTERFLY PLANT STAKE

14 BUTTERFLY ALIGHTS

15 HOME SWEET HOME

16 CURIO CATCH-ALL

17 MOTHS TO A FLAME PORCHLIGHT

18 GLASSWING IN FLIGHT

RECLAIMED WINDOWS

19 FIREFLY CABIN WINDOW

PATTERNS

SUPPLIERS

FEATURED ARTISTS

Missy Graff Ballone

Courtney Baker

Patrick Hurley

Bryony Jo Lane

Janel Foo

Helena Rakhuba

Flannery Cronin

Kara Bussey

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Kicking Glass doesn’t happen alone. I am filled with gratitude as I write these acknowledgments.

Thank you to Herbert Press and Bloomsbury Publishing for supporting hand craft by making a home for this book and other wonderful craft books. To Clare Martelli for guiding this project into being and for having faith in me. To Natasha Collin for her patience and diligence. To Lucy Morton for her thoughtful design.

Thank you to the Society of Authors and Elizabeth Haylett Clark for holding our hands when we felt way out of our depth. You are doing important work.

Thanks to all of my family, especially my mother, Susan Cooper, who has never wavered in her support of my creative endeavors, and to Dr G, who walked up and down the hill each day that summer with loads of grand ideas and building supplies. I can never thank you enough.

This book was made better by Courtney Baker, Kara Bussey, Flannery Cronin, Janel Foo, Patrick Hurley, Bryony Jo Lane, and Helena Rakhuba, who so generously shared their stained glass thoughts and images, and by Missy Graff Balone whose advice is in my mind as I both craft and type. You all inspire me.

Always gratitude in my heart for Lake Mohawk and Lake Minnewaska where I do my best dreaming.

Most importantly, this book literally would not exist without my partner and love Robert Giaquinta, who took my scribbles and turned them into beautiful writing. We each rescued the other a few times during this process and we’ve come out a stronger team in the end.

INTRODUCTION

A LIGHT ON THE JOURNEY

During a particularly challenging time of life, I built myself a sanctuary. I gathered what was in my world – from scraps of glass, discarded lumber, old window frames, and a neglected corner of my backyard, to my unique set of crafting skills, experiences, fantasies, and fears – and followed my folly. I built a cabin that I would cover entirely with my stained glass visions. I didn’t exactly know how to build a cabin, nor how to procure the supplies, nor how I’d find the time, motivation, and cash to complete this project, but I grabbed a few concrete blocks and a shovel, and began to lay the foundation in a spot that felt right.

Now, six years later, I can walk the short path to my stained glass cabin and feel absolute satisfaction. There’s no electricity, no heat, no water. But my cabin surrounds me with the creatures of my own making: oversized snails and mushrooms, gigantic dandelions and ferns, feathers and butterflies, crystals and webs, dogwood petals and deer antlers, the enormous wingspan of a hawk, and the comforting gaze of a fantastic purple barn owl. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the spot where I chose to lay the foundation seems to be a focal point for the sun as it follows its daily and seasonal path across the sky. Somehow, light always imbues the cabin with life that shifts and changes constantly, adding more to this sacred space than I ever could have planned.

Stained glass is a medium that transforms simple materials into something absolutely magnificent. It is elemental and alchemical. Sand, limestone, and soda ash. Iron, manganese, chromium, tin. These are the minerals that make up glass and the metals that suffuse it with that beautiful spectrum of reds, blues, yellows, and greens. It’s simple science, and it’s ancient – humans since the early Egyptians have been making glass. BUT, there’s one final ingredient that invokes the real magic… LIGHT. It’s the light shining through a stained glass window that brings it alive and makes this medium truly unique. The closest parallel I can think of in art is Alexander Calder’s mobile sculpture with the added element of motion. When his newly invented mobiles first began dancing around in the air, Calder must have been thrilled. That’s how I feel when I see the sunlight illuminating stained glass.

WHAT THIS BOOK IS

I hope to share with you the joy that I continue to find in stained glass. Making art is a journey, and this book is a companion, for the long term. It doesn’t necessarily matter what section of the trail you’re on. If you’re just starting out, we’ll go over the basics… tools and studio setup, safety, fundamental techniques… but let’s take it so much beyond that! Further on down the path, we’ll explore incorporating found and foraged materials into your work, and we’ll consider strategies that will allow your designs to move into the third dimension, step by step. If you’ve got great ideas, we’ll figure out how to achieve them in glass; conversely, if you love the craft but are in need of inspiration, I’ve got you covered too… this book includes a bunch of patterns that you can use as a foundation to grace with your personal style. Some of what we’ll cover are tried and true techniques and motifs, but there’s always space for your own thing.

We’ll explore stained glass construction using the copper foil method, commonly referred to as the ‘Tiffany technique,’ which involves wrapping each piece of hand-cut glass in copper foil and joining the copper-wrapped pieces together with solder. This method is a departure from the much older techniques of joining the glass pieces with a thicker lead channel called ‘came,’ and providing detail by painting upon or ‘staining’ the glass. If you think of the sacred stained glass windows that might be found in a cathedral, you can probably picture these traditional techniques.

The newer Tiffany technique was actually patented in 1886 by Sanford Bray as a ‘cheap, simple, convenient, and expeditious means for joining colored glass mosaics.’ Notably (for me at least), Bray’s patent specifically highlights the novel method’s usefulness for natural themes. He mentions that the ability to control the width of the solder line allows for a ‘natural tapering form’ suitable for depicting stems, branches, and leaves. Departing from the traditional lead came technique allows for the use of smaller pieces of glass and a thinner line, resulting in more intricate design possibilities.

Louis Comfort Tiffany used this technique to great effect. Additionally, he and his contemporaries innovated the use of opalescent glass – more opaque than cathedral glass, often containing layers of multiple colors and unusual textures of ripples and waves. The streaking and mottling in a sheet of this new opalescent glass allowed the artists to provide detail, shading, and depth that were previously created by painting the transparent, single-color cathedral glass. By minimizing or even eliminating the use of paint, more light is able to illuminate the windows.

We’ll follow the course set by these artists, and we’ll explore some even less traditional techniques as well. Our projects will incorporate found objects, they’ll move beyond windows into 3D, and they’ll touch upon jewelry making, custom installations, sound design principles, and more.

WHAT THIS BOOK ISN’T

This book will NOT cover lead came construction and glass painting, though these techniques are obviously worthy of your exploration. I do like to incorporate lead when I am looking to add a more traditional feel to a project – or when I want ‘line’ to be a more forward feature in a geometric piece – and lead is being used in awesome contemporary works. This book WIll cover the use of lead came around the perimeter of several projects, so some of the basics will be touched upon. We’ll skip glass painting – as much as I love it – which is deceptively complicated. It’s not simply painting onto the glass; it requires specialized paints that are made with glass and other chemicals and minerals that must be fired in a kiln to literally become a part of the glass sheet. Finally, we will not cover glass fusing, where different colors of glass can be layered and shaped in a kiln. Each of these methods of glass working can be incorporated into one project or explored on its own. We don’t have the space to cover them here, but after you master the techniques in this book, you’ll be in a perfect position to add one or all of these skills to your bag of tricks.

Similarly, this book will not cover EVERY possible variation of the copper foil technique. It can be human nature to want a black-and-white, right-and-wrong approach to a task, but in this craft there are so many ways to get to the same end point. I’ll instruct with the methods that I use daily in my work, that I find sound and efficient, that I’ve developed over twenty plus years of working in glass, but if you have learned or developed different techniques that work for you, that is wonderful. I love to visit with other stained glass artists and see their studio setups and tools and watch how they work. I don’t judge them for not doing it the way I do it; it’s fun and educational to see other methods. To highlight this, I’ve asked a handful of my favorite stained glass artists to share glimpses of their process throughout this book. Try everything out and see what makes this craft the most pleasurable for you.

HOW TO BEGIN

I fell in love with stained glass the very first time I picked up a glass cutter. I was in college studying graphic design, and I was not thrilled about spending all of my days on a computer. I yearned to work with my hands, so I took a stained glass workshop at a local studio. I knew nothing about the process, and every step seemed like magic to me. To be able to manipulate these beautiful raw materials into my imagined compositions was thrilling. I never did end up getting a graphic design job – it immediately became all stained glass, all the time, for me.

If you are new to stained glass as a craft, then I want to assure you that there’s a relatively low cost of entry. A simple stained glass studio can be set up at home, even in a small apartment or tiny house, with a minor investment. It is a craft that is easy to learn, and the necessary supplies are readily available online, if not locally. The chapters on Studio Setup & Safety and Tools & Supplies will help you to set up shop.

That said, you should also be aware of some of the medium’s possibly frustrating aspects. Stained glass is not a fast craft. Every step is slow and labor intensive, and you can’t rush things. Because of this, it is important that you enjoy the process. Take your time and work slowly, enjoying the tactile quality of the glass, the sound and feeling of the score, the tink and clink of breaking the glass perfectly along your line. Even when things go wrong – they will – enjoy the experience. You are going to stink at glass cutting at first. You are definitely going to stink at soldering. The only cure for the stinking is practice. Lots and lots of practice. So remind yourself to enjoy the process and find pleasure in the practice. I promise you will get better quickly as long as you keep