random thoughts – Day 2,406 (Sunday 10/18) – laboring

Pinned and ready for soldering.

The second day of the art studios event was today. Once again, I planned to go, dressed to go, and then got caught up in laboring in stained glass and didn’t go.

Today’s time-sucking, self-assigned task was drawing new designs and then cutting small red diamond shapes and then foiling and burnishing them. It took about five hours to do 29 diamond shapes and some random green scraps in other shapes.

After an early evening break for grocery shopping which marked my first time outside the house since Friday afternoon, another two hours were spent cutting and foiling tiny yellow circles and then burnishing and trimming back the foil to expose more of the glass. The various parts are pinned to the corkboard and will be soldered Monday after class or maybe Tuesday.

The benefits to working with lead over copper foil are more evident each day. Lead pieces work up a lot faster because they don’t require such precise cutting, the edges of each piece of glass don’t need  to be wrapped in foil, and there is a lot less soldering required. 

It’s quicker measuring and cutting a length of lead came, setting the glass into the rails and soldering just the joints of the lead rails. But I am getting better at the foiling, burnishing, and soldering. The glass cutting part is either great or a total pain in the derriere and there is no way to know in advance, but that applies in either method. I have a spool of lead came, so bounce back and forth between methods is an option.