Saturday, September 27, 2008

Stained Glass and Pumpkin Progress

While we were staying with Dug's mom, Rhonda (or "Momda," as I like to call her), she was nice enough to teach us a little bit about her current hobby-of-choice: stained glass. You have to understand the level of niceness Momda showed us here: Dug and I, especially I, are clumsy and unfamiliar with the tools and materials, so there was a lot of equipment abuse and glass wasting while we were trying to get the hang of it - but Rhonda was completely patient with us even though I am sure there were moments where watching us blunder through this project was excruciating.

We somehow deleted the photos of the very beginning of the project, but you can see here that the design is sketched out on tracing paper, and we are cutting the pieces to fit and holding them in place with horseshoe nails. Each finished piece is wrapped in adhesive copper foil.
Dug made most of the color choices for our project. I love the amber glass. It's going to look so beautiful when we get it hung up in our window! When everything is assembled, you brush flux (which makes the solder bind with the copper) over the copper seams and solder over them. Dug did all of the soldering by himself. See what a fantastic job he did?

Somehow my Nuclear Pumpkin sweater doesn't seem as lovely in comparison with the stained glass, but I suppose I ought to give a progress report. I finished a sleeve and have a good close-up photo that is mostly color accurate:
The yarn is making a subtle striping effect. I really like it! I'm glad Dug has decided the colors are too "pretty" to be suitable for a tough, rugged, manly sweater. The blues are very "denim" - it's going to look great with jeans. Well, hopefully it will look great; I'm not a very professional pullover knitter yet, and I'm not using a pattern. I read "Knitting Without Tears" by Elizabeth Zimmerman, intending to use her seamless raglan guidelines, but when I actually started knitting I ended up taking the "cast on and knit until it looks like a sweater" approach. The photo below shows how I've started the body of the sweater, but the color is not quite right - picture pumpkin orange instead of brown.
I'm going to do a bit of shaping on the sides so I won't look like I'm wearing a potato sack. I'm fairly certain I'm going to screw up and have to reknit the body, but that's Standard Operating Procedure for me!

1 comment:

JenLaurie said...

So when are you going to teach the rest of us how to do stain glass?? I can pay in fiber.