Glassy-Eyed

Tomorrow Fellow Traveler and I begin a new household venture: We are going to learn to make stained glass.

This is something FT has wanted to do for a long, long time, for creative and therapeutic reasons alike. I've always loved stained glass -- my 60's-era childhood coincided with the great hippie renaissance of stained glass, and I remember wanting to live in an old house with stained glass door and transom panels, and today I am a great admirer of classic stained glass designers like Edward Burne-Jones and William Comfort Tiffany -- but until now I never imagined attempting to create stained glass artwork myself. Between my perfectionistic deer-in-headlights response to new challenges and my tendency toward klutziness, I probably wouldn't have chosen a hobby involving rulers, sharp objects and a soldering iron; but I am trying to stretch out my comfort zone, if only because I want to live with the beautiful things I can create if I learn how to do this well.

We recently kitted ourselves out with the requisite tools, and tomorrow we are going to our first class in Bay City, where we learn how to use said tools, and how to handle glass without severing an artery; we'll also pick a simple design for a first project. (Not the lovely stained glass you see here, which is part of a window in the Liverpool Cathedral; hat tip to someone named Tim Rutledge, whose photo popped up when I did a Google search.)