hey look at this thing i finished: II

This is part 3 of a 3 parts series

Part 1: Wherein an idea is born

Part 2: Wherein a woman of glass is given life

Anyone who's been to any of my apartments in the past three years, or has read far enough back on this blog, should remember this:

It is pictured here as an entertainment center, but it hasn't been used for that in some time. By my estimation it is the least practical thing that I own. It weighs well over 200 pounds, probably close to 300 (or more). It's difficult for one person to even move around in a room. It's constructed from a bunch of 7 x 5s.

Also, I adore it.

I don't really know why. It doesn't have a lot of room. It's inconvenient to put things under it. It's too hard to move to be a coffee table. I have no use for an entertainment center. It works well as a work bench, mainly because it's so sturdy I can just stand there beating on it and nothing will happen, but being as short as it is, it's inconvenient to work over. I imagine I love it for the same reason I so badly want a Curta. They both perform their simple function in an overly grand yet pointless way (present day that is, Curtas were pretty fucking sweet back in their day). Remember the Tamagotchi Gesture? There's probably a bit of that here too, I'm not sure who else would love the fucking thing.

I mention this, because when I decided I would be making the world's greatest table, it was absolutely the first place I looked for design inspiration.

That's actually terribly misleading. It's kind of rare I sit down and say "hey, I'm gonna make a thing, let's brainstorm!" They moreso just happen. For example: The finishing of SG1 overlapped with the making of SG2 quite a bit. I really liked the frame that I made for SG1 and that sort of thing seemed like the way to go. However. SG2 weighs a lot. I'm guessing 30-40 pounds (probably more, I tend to underestimate the weights of things). So not only would it be more dangerous to mount it on a wall, given that it's over twice the size of SG1 it seemed a touch more ridiculous. The frame thing seemed solid though, so what else could I do with that? Well, if it's not going to be mounted on the wall, I suppose that necessarily means it would have to be something that goes on the floor. It would look dumb just laying on the ground, so a table just made sense. Then it was the normal, I had the idea, I offhandedly figured out how to make it real, then I had to make it real.

The wood I used to make the frame for SG1 was 1 x 4, which was fine for that project, but for this I thought it would be good if the stained glass went farther into the wood, to give it some added support (again, much bigger). The first thought was to up it to a 2 x 4, then I could easily get an inch into the wood, which seemed pretty sturdy. You may recall a big part of the reason I went with the 1 x 4 in the first place was Lowe's sold precut boards that were able to fit in my car (ability to get home is pretty important). So I went around looking for some pre-cut 2 x 4s (again, at Lowe's). They didn't have any (at least any small enough) but looking around I was like zomg 2 x 6s are delightful. It made perfect sense because I had at some point decided I wanted the table legs to be made out of 6 x 6s (I was at the time under the mistaken impression that the above mentioned table was constructed out of 6 x 6s) so then the leg width would be the same as the frame, SYMMETRICAL! Tragically Lowe's didn't seem to have any lengths smaller than 12' and since I'm not capable of asking for help (also I didn't see a saw anywhere) I felt it was time to move on. I'm inclined to say there was some other compelling reason for me to look elsewhere, but I have no idea what that is.

I was walking around Menard's when I realized that I have no idea what I'm doing. I suppose it's probably pretty common that when wingin' it, I don't actually have any idea what I'm doing and just make it up as I go. I rarely think about this fact though. Going through the lumber section at Menard's though, I thought to myself "huh, there sure are a lot of types of woods, I bet there's compelling reasons to use each of them, maybe if I had some idea what I was doing I could make a more informed decision. OR I could buy these 2" x 6" x 4' scrap boards that are a buck fitty a piece."

The problem was I had at some point decided that when I painted the table, I didn't want it to be immediately distinguishable as wood. This meant shitty wood was a problem because any cracks, knots or other assorted imperfections would be trouble. I looked around some more and found some wood that was perfect. Looked great, right size...tragically 40 dollars for six or so feet (aka not enough). So I says fuck it I says, I'll get the shitty wood and make it work, cause that, is what winners do. I sorted through the eight or so pieces they had in that scrap pile, got the best looking two and was on my way.

Back home, I somehow managed to miscut both pieces (ooooh measure TWICE cut once, not the other way around). Four feet long as a length was really tragic as all four pieces that made up the frame were slightly longer than two feet. Well that sucked. Back at square one I went to Home Depot. Home Depot totally DOES have a saw and so I got a 2" x 6" x 10' cut in half and I was on my way.

Frame construction was pretty much identical to that of SG1, except this time the grooves I cut were a bit deeper and farther in on the wood. The other added wrinkle for this was the support layer. Strictly speaking you shouldn't display stained glass horizontally. It might be rigid, but it's still going to want to bow inward. Especially with a piece like this, as heavy as it is, it would probably sit in the table fine for awhile, then one day I'd come home to a pile of broken glass and weep. I think I must have just googled glass shops and came across mclean county glass and mirror. Great people, I went in and explained what I wanted, the guy recommended something and it was done the next day. The way this is set up is the clear glass sits right below the stained glass in the frame. The stained glass stays perfectly flat and light can still shine through.

It was then time to make it work. That involved plaster.

I got some stuff and filled in any dents/cracks/general unsightlyness in the wood. In addition, I built up the wood at the seams where it was uneven, so when it was painted you wouldn't be able to see. For that same reason I had recessed the screws slightly and then filled those holes in with plaster.

Boy that was a lot of work. Next up was primerin' time! I didn't photograph that. At this point I moved onto constructing the rest of the table. Did I mention earlier that I wanted the legs to be 6 x 6s? No one sells pre cut small sections of 6 x 6s, cause who would ever want that? I went to Home Depot to see if I could get one cut only to be hit with the tragic news that their saw cannot cut something that big

:'(

I checked with general life consult El Fuego (conversation took place via texts while I wandered Home Depot)

me: does your dad have some sort of device that could cut a 6 x 6

el fuego: ...a chainsaw would be my immediate reaction of anything i know to be in the garage, but im very sure thats a horrible idea

me: haha that was my initial thought for how to do it, but yea, I can't see that ending well.

el fuego: hehe. Well this is the flaw when i pretty much only ever use a hand saw, bow saw, or like a little dremel tool for anything ive ever done or suggested.

me: man, it'd take for fucking ever to cut a 6 x 6 with a dremel

el fuego: at that point the bow saw may well be a better option and that seems like a pretty bad one on its own merit.

me: I had to downsize to a 4 x 6 : (

el fuego: what is this for?

me: the greatest table ever made.

el fuego: hehe nice

Did you get the important take away from that conversation? That I had to downsize to 4 x 6 legs? I was devastated. After it had some time to sink in though, it didn't seem so bad. The 6" dimension was the most important thing to me and a 6 x 4 is still pretty beefy, so I thought this would look just fine and potentially be more practical. Normally I don't try and get any "precision" cuts done at the place, because guys who get paid minimum wage aren't going to try that hard (not to put them down, they do good work, but I needed this to be perfect). Of course 6 x 4s aren't much easier to cut than 6 x 6s, which meant I was stuck with their work. I went with 15" segments, which would make the overall table height close to two feet tall. How did I arrive at that as a good height for the table? No idea. At all.

They weren't perfectly equal segments, but close enough. This wood went through the same plaster process as the frame wood, but man, these were of dubious quality. I'm not of the impression 6 x 4s are ever used in situations where looks matter.

The plan was that the legs would not actually be attached to the frame, rather there would be a smaller table that the frame would sit on, that ended up looking like this:

Now due to lack of precision tooling, the square there didn't slot into the frame perfectly. To keep light from leaking out the sides and to keep the frame held in place, weather stripping was added around the edges to act like a gasket.

Lighting was identical to SG1, except this time I used three light strips. As you may have noticed from the above pictures, everything was painted black. For the table top I went back to Mclean County Glass and Mirror. Again they did a great job, this time I also had them add four holes in the corners, so I would have some way to attach the glass to the frame. Problem is the frame isn't a perfect rectangle, but the glass is. This meant that if I just set the glass on it, it would look terrible as this unevenness would be pretty apparent. To combat this I decided to use some risers.

I was working under the faulty assumption that if I went to a home improvement store there would be a table building section and in there I would find something meeting my specifications. Lowe's apparently doesn't cater to the DIY table crowd. I ended up just walking the aisles hoping to be struck by inspiration, which is exactly what happened! I found something called a connecting bolt, I forgot to take a picture before putting them to use, but here's the shot from the packaging.

See I felt this was perfect because the bolt had a nice flat top and I figured if I turned the nut around it would be a nice surface for the glass to sit on. And indeed, that would have been perfect, if things ever worked out that way.

Two problems:

1. You can't actually turn the nut around, it's not threaded that way, the other side has an allen cap

.2. There wasn't enough thread on the bolt, even screwed all the way in, it wouldn't actually grip the table.

Of course those are only problems for close minded people. This, you see, is exactly why I say everyone should own a tap and die set. What's a tap and die set? Well a tap is sort of like a really sharp screw with grooves cut into it that you can use to cut threads into a hole. A die is the opposite, it's like a really sharp nut with grooves cut into it that you can use to cut threads onto a rod of some kind. Some short work later and I had bolts that were threaded to the top and nuts that worked the right way.

I ended up going back and getting another set of four nuts, this second set would be embedded into the table to act as a washer for the spacer, as well as holding the bolds securely in place. The last bit of work that had to be done to prepare them for the table was to put felts on the top of the nuts and the bottom of the screws, ended up like this.The rest actually worked out perfectly. The frame was dropped onto the table. The nuts were put into the frame. The glass was set on top and the bolts were tightened down. Which brings us to why I assume any of you are here.

Wow! I bet it looks even better lit up! Well, that's debatable, I'm kind of torn.

It does look better in person, that shot doesn't really do the lighting justice. I know I know, you're still not convinced, you're saying "Mike, you know what would help? If you had some sort of stupid art shot. Do you, have, some sort of stupid art shot?"

Like looking into the ark of the fucking covenant innit? No? Well fuck you too.

Greatest table ever? I'm glad we're in agreement.

Making of!

hey look at this thing i made: V

This is part 2 of a 3 part series.

Part 1: Wherein an idea is born

Part 3: Wherein shit gets real

When we last left, the pattern had just been finished. If you recall, the first piece I made I used some heavier weight paper that I had from the drawering class I took. That didn't go very well, so it was back to the drawing board for a material to make the pattern out of. In the aisle stained glass supplies are in at Hobby Lobby they have these sheets of clear plastic. I'm not sure what their actual purpose is, but I thought they'd be pretty good to make a pattern out of because while they were fairly sturdy they were also fairly pliable and seemed thin enough that they could be cut easily. I was really excited about it because this seemed like something that clearly would not wilt when hit with water AND it seemed like it would be reusable. I mentioned in the post for SG1 that I had no desire to repeat the same pieces, but it would be nice to have a reusable pattern so I would at least have the option (if nothing else I would have the option to remake parts that needed to be redone). That was uh, that was a mistake, is I believe the technical term. It started off well.

The markings from the carbon paper had transferred but weren't too hard to rub off, so I went ahead and started re-writing piece numbers/colors. It was at this point I said to myself, I said "Mike, why don't you try cutting it, just a little bit, just to see how it goes." Didn't go well. Maybe it's just because I have shitty scissors but the edges around the cuts cracked as I went. I tried going over it with a razor, but it was too thick and that proved too difficult. The last idea I had was to get out the ole Dremel and fit it with the cut-off wheel, but that just melted the plastic. Well shit. Back to Hobby Lobby. I ended up picking matboard because it was thick, but I was quite confident that worst case scenario I could cut it with a razor. Matboard was ok, not great, definitely won't be used again. First of all the thickness was good at resisting water damage, but it was actually thicker than the cutting wheel on my glass cutter, so all the pieces had an extra eighth of an inch around them which made grinding take a lot longer. The other bad part about it being thick was it really held it's shape. That seems good, except it meant it didn't want to glue flat, it would either bend up on the edges or in the middle. Good thing I own a lot of clamps.

Why yes, that IS a copy of Saul Williams The Seventh Octave. The only other comment to make on the pattern to pieces process is that I put a lot more thought in how the grain of the glass went. Anytime I was cutting a set of pieces that were going to be placed consecutively, I tried to line them up on the glass so it would sort of flow together.

You can see how the arm segments are set up there. I think my thought process with the fingers was this way they'd all have the same direction line. Also, the knuckles are fucking stupid, I have no idea why I thought that was a good idea.

I was really thrown off during the grinding process. SG1 really was made over the course of a couple days and it's true that it had a third of the pieces that SG2 does, but wouldn't that logically extrapolate to at most a week of work? I suppose it might if it were a week of me putting in eight hour days grinding glass, but I didn't think they'd give me a week off work. I was often putting in three hours of work a night and it still ended up taking me over a month to finish the grinding. That seemed so insane to me when I was thinking about it after the fact, here were my final thoughts as to why:

1. Detail was more important. On SG1 the only pieces that took any time were the mosaic on the underwear. Giant pieces like the legs/lower back/sky (I guess that's supposed to be the sky? I mean, it's blue) do not take very long to do and they cover a large part of the overall piece. I suspect the mosaic would have taken quite some time if it had mattered. I'm not saying I didn't care about how it looked, but really so long as the outer edges lined up it was fine. It was pretty irrelevant how the inner pieces fit together, which made sub-par grinding acceptable. With SG2 only the outer colored parts didn't matter. If the lines on the body didn't fit together right, it could end up looking pretty stupid pretty easily.

2. I was less tolerant of the pattern becoming unglued. For SG1 when the pattern started to come off I just went with it and did my best to get the piece to the right shape. This time, when the pattern started to come off, I stopped and re-glued. I was pretty unhappy with how the rubber cement had been working at this point, so I went to the number 1 gluing resource, thistothat.com. They suggested something called 3M 77. 3M 77 is a delight. It ended up adding a ton of time though because I probably re-glued a third to half of all the pieces.

3. Due to a poor job of keeping the sponge wet for SG1, I think my grinding wheel got quite a bit duller than it should have. It was still functional, but it took longer.

4. I kind of like doing it. While not that difficult, it does require a bit of dexterity and all of my concentration. It's the same reason I like knitting. It forces, as Swansong would say, me to listen past the noise inside my head. It was easy to just sit there and lose a couple of hours doing this, kind of a nice break from being a spaz.

THAT'S A BIG BASKET OF STAINED GLASS CHUNKS!

Give em a wash, put some copper foil on and good to go! Or I would have been, had I not dropped one of the pieces.

God that sucked. This is why I want a pattern I can re-use, so I could just cut a new piece instead of having to try and trace a pile of shattered glass. /sigh.

This was where the next big difference between SG2 and SG1 showed up.

DO YOU SEE HOW POORLY THOSE FIT!?! God that was infuriating. SG1 I would have just rolled with it. I could still lay the solder fine so it would, I guess, be ok, but little imperfections like that add up and if I had taken the time to try and get all the detail in during grinding, I may as well fix this right? I think in total I had to touch up twenty pieces, so that problems like that, ended up looking like this:

The other challenge was that when I made the pattern, I did my best to draw a square around the piece, but in reality it was probably skewed. This meant that when I tried to force it into the jig I made, it didn't want to fit perfectly. Few more touch-ups and it was solder time. That was a lot of fucking soldering. Despite sweating to death in my respirator, it was still enjoyable, because the thing was finally really coming together. It's hard to see this:

And not smile. Of course even the washing of this thing was more difficult. It's far too big to fit in my sink and the shower was pretty ineffective. Bucket and rag go! Final step was patina and finishing compound. You may recall there are two colors of patina available, so three line colors total. My thought was copper would be a no brainer for the inside of the body. Silver made sense for the colored outer. That left black for shadow. I was pretty happy with how that turned out. Did you forget how it looks? Here's that same picture!

I would have taken a picture of it with sun coming through, but I forget to do that before starting part 3. What happens in part 3? Shit gets real son.

Making of!

hey look at this idea i had

This is part 1 of a 3 part series, it's uh, it's a long'n.

Part 2: Wherein a woman of glass is given life

Part 3: Wherein shit gets real

We were out at dinner for Donny's bachelor party. This was the saturday after I had posted the story about my first stained glass window. I brought up the topic of the window as I still found it quite funny and B commented that I should check out some video of a guy making a stained glass window of naked woman. It somehow had never occurred to me that this would be something other people did, but I feel like that must be a rule 34 corollary. "For any medium that exists which can be used to create imagery, it has been used to create imagery of an erotic/pornographic nature."

10,000 hours of googling later I found there was a bit of it out there. The biggest purveyor was this place in canada. I won't link to their site and here's why. The incomparable Neil Gaiman has a policy when working on a book, or even just thinking about working on a book, that he won't read any books that he thinks tell a similar story. His logic is that he doesn't want his work to be even subconsciously influenced by someone else's interpretation. I like that idea quite a bit and while it's not something I do, it's good here that I didn't have anyone else's influence because it might have held me to a lower standard. What I'm saying is that all the erotic stained glass out there is fucking terrible. This website in particular had a number of pieces with $500 price tags. I was in shock by this so I e-mailed their customer support:

TO: (removed)

FROM: highjack@fyadiaf.com

SUBJECT: question

So I was going through your available erotic stained glass and was just curious, do you actually sell these?

TO: highjack@fyadiaf.com

FROM: (removed)

SUBJECT: RE: question

Thanks for writing in. Yes all the work there is available for sale, was there one that interested you?

TO: (removed)

FROM: highjack@fyadiaf.com

SUBJECT: RE: RE: question

I'm sorry, you misunderstood me. My question was, have you ever actually sold one? They're fucking terrible and I find it so hard to believe that someone would actually pay $500 for one.

TO: highjack@fyadiaf.com

FROM: (removed)

SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: question

FUCK YOU THEY'RE TERRIBLE, WHY DON'T YOU COME TO CANADA AND WE'LL SHOW YOU HOW EROTIC STAINED GLASS IS DONE.

TO: (removed)

FROM: highjack@fyadiaf.com

SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: question

FUCK YOU COME TO CANADA, WHY DON'T YOU COME TO AMERICA AND I'LL SHOW YOU HOW IT'S DONE.

TO: highjack@fyadiaf.com

FROM: (removed)

SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: question

FUCK YOU COME TO AMERICA, YOU THINK YOU'RE SO BIG? WHAT DO YOU THINK A $500 EROTIC STAINED GLASS WINDOW LOOKS LIKE?!

TO: (removed)

FROM: highjack@fyadiaf.com

SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: question

I don't know, something like this?

TO: highjack@fyadiaf.com

FROM: (removed)

SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: question

...

You win this round America.

U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

While working on the first window, it became clear to me that this was something I was going to stick with, not necessarily the erotic, but stained glass in general. Of course I was doing a shtick, so I would be doing at least a bit more of the erotic. I felt the logical progression was to do a set of tits next. That idea turned out to be quite a bit more difficult than I had originally thought.

I took a drawering class once. Sometimes the teacher would lecture, but mainly he would say, "here's a thing, drawer it." He would then walk around the class and give additional instruction to people who needed it. Despite the fact that I almost never got instruction in that class, I learned quite a bit about drawering. I'm not sure that a better drawerer now than I was before the class, but just by drawering for three hours a night I began to learn about the sort of things you can do, the techniques a drawerer has available to them to create a picture. Of course with a pencil you could create a fairly photo-realistic picture, not so with stained glass. You are always going to lose detail, unless it was something that was not finely detailed to begin with (I've seen some stained glass of cartoons that looked pretty much just like they were drawn). I currently feel the key is pick a couple details that you know you can transfer and really define the picture. Let's break down SG1 (as it shall hence be known) to show you what I mean.

It's a big ass and while you can certainly tell that from the width and the fact the underwear doesn't appear to cover it very well, it was hard to make it have depth. I only have so much control over how the colors look, so I can't really do shading. So what can I do? Well the first thing to notice is the lines on the underwear. I broke it up into pieces like that because I tend to associate stained glass with mosaicy things like that and wanted some in this piece. The lines, however, were done in a very specific way. The idea is that the lines sort of radiate out from the place the ass would protrude the most, my hope was that this would suggest stretching of the underwear.

What the upper left arrow is trying to point out is how the underwear slopes downward, to suggest going down from the top of the ass. Also, more zoomed in like this you can see how the individual pieces sort of taper down at the ends, again to suggest wrapping around. The arrow on the side is pointing to how the line of her hip becomes slightly concave, the idea there was to make it clear the underwear was tight and pulling the flesh in slightly. It is, I'm told, hard for big booty girls to find well fitting underwear.

The last thing I want to point out is the bottom stripe of the underwear. That final line is a continuous thing, but because the cheeks are curving in at that point, the middle of the line is wrapped away from view.

Overall, it's very clearly an ass, it's very clearly a big ass and it was not too hard to make a drawering that would transfer and illustrate this.

Back on the topic of tits, I wanted to do a similar sort of thing to SG1, a zoomed in picture of just the rack. The problem was I wanted them to be naked, so I wouldn't be able to use stretched clothing to suggest size/shape. After looking at the terrible art on the aforementioned site, I decided it probably was just not going to be possible to do a straight on shot, at least not with my current skill level and equipment. Luckily there was an obvious solution to the problem, by doing a shot in profile you would get a very clear idea of the size and shape of the breast. For something that simple though, I didn't really want to do just a zoomed in section. This meant the complexity was going to be pushed beyond what I felt I could drawer well. After some searching to find an image of sufficient resolution that I could blow it up to the size I wanted, I settled on this:

This image had a lot going for it. First of all, it is, I feel, very tastefully done. That's important to me because this isn't just supposed to be porn for the sake of porn. The second plus, probably the most important, is the breast is shot in a way that accomplishes what I wanted, it looked like it would look just fine even with just a single flat shade. Another thing it had going for it was the ass, I wanted another crack (HA HA HA) at doing an ass.

I never really did much to indicate the size of SG1, but it's about 1' x 2'. For SG2, given how much more complex it is, I figured I'd up the size to 2' x 2'. I opened the picture in Excel to size it (I have no idea why I do this) and was delighted to find out that it in fact was already 4' x 4' so I could easily get the size I wanted without losing quality. Printed out, I think it was broken up over eight sheets of 8.5 x 14 paper. I taped it together and put it down on the table to begin the pattern making process.

Despite it only being my second piece, it had already become clear to me just how important making the pattern is, how you break it up can really effect how easy it is to cut/grind the individual pieces. I was sort of conscious of that, but not really (that's more of a part two sort of story though). I think it was taped to my dining room table for the better part of two weeks while I tried to decide exactly how I wanted to do it. Initially I tried breaking up the body into as many big pieces as possible, the goal I think was to make it look as much like the photo as possible. This was stupid. As I mentioned earlier, there's a fairly finite limit on how realistic you can make it look, so instead of trying to hit that goal it makes more sense to embrace the medium and run away from it. I looked at some stained glass pictures online (non-erotic) to see how people far more talented than I had done bodies in the past. The general theme seemed to be breaking it up into a bunch of little pieces and just saying "hey, it's stained glass, this is what you're expecting to see." I liked that idea so I kept breaking the bigger sections up smaller and smaller. This would also let me incorporate some approximation of shading into the body. Of course the end result was that the piece as a whole was broken up into over a hundred different chunks. As far as the background coloring went, I wanted to mimic the sort of thing you might see in a cathedral window. This meant a bunch of clear shapes and some nice colors.

I got it to a point that I felt was "done" but I wanted to wait a few days to let it marinate to see if I wanted to change anything as it was becoming clear this was going to be a long project and I wanted to make sure if I was going to put a bunch of work into it that I would like the final product. Then I remembered that my landlady was going to be coming through my apartment for some sort of annual inspection and I didn't want the next time I saw her to be, "So, giant picture of a naked woman on your dining room table, how's that working out?" So this became the final pattern:

Little did I know the problems I would have in store, but that's for part two.

hey look at this thing i fixed

I've touched on this before, but I have yet to put much thought into the display of stained glass windows I make. In fact the extent of thought I had really put in was that I was terrified to hang them cause what if they fell and broke? What use is a stained glass window that you can't display you ask? I don't know, but it's probably of more use than a pile of broken glass. For me this is fine. I make these windows on a whim and can take my time coming up with something to do with them. Of course, as I said before, that wouldn't make for a very compelling gift.

"Here's a lovely handcrafted stained glass window for you! There's just one catch, you can never display it. Ever."

You may recall with the Michigan State window, the idea I came up with was to put little suction cups on each corner. I'm not ready to call it a failure, because as a proof of concept I think it worked, it probably just needed different suction cups. You see, this happened:

Apparently the suction cup plan wasn't foolproof. Luckily I had read up on stained glass repair and it seemed pretty easy in theory and unlike other things that I think are easy in theory, this actually was. If you've read both the stained glass making ofs that I've done so far, you probably understand that the glass isn't actually attached to the solder frame. The frame is made around the glass and when it hardens the glass can't really move. This means that you can break the glass out, cut a new piece and solder it in place. Step 1? Bigger hammer.

Bigger hammer is a colloquialism used in the lab where I work. It, in essence, refers to using a brute force approach, but more so using a brute force approach when something else doesn't work. I have to disassemble a lot of vacuums at work. The ones made by electrolux I know pretty well how to navigate, but often competitor units have screws hidden because they're working as part of a larger plan to make me miserable. So bigger hammer. Often literally means getting a big hammer and smashing the vacuum with it. It might be possible to get the broken pieces out of the window as is, or:

It was really difficult for me to resist buying a sledgehammer for that picture. I wonder if there's something exciting hidden under that towel, perhaps to be revealed in a future post.

After the glass is broken out, the next step is to remove the solder around the edges where the glass was. This was kind of reassuring about the structural integrity of these pieces, because it was kind of tough to pull the solder off. I ended up having to get the iron out and melting it off in parts. That brought us to this point:

The other corner piece also needed to be removed, but I was worried that if I took it off then then that middle piece would fall off too as it would only be attached to the rest of the piece on one side. Typically in a situation like this I would need to lay the window on top of a piece of paper and trace a new pattern for the pieces. Luckily, the single upside to the foam I used to make the pattern for this piece was that it was easy to save and re-use. I dug out the pieces I needed, traced and cut replacement parts. After getting them ground, cleaned and foiled I went to set them to solder and came across an interesting problem:

You see, the solder beads stick above the glass by as much as an eighth of an inch in places. When constructing the window this isn't a problem because you do the entire side and then when you flip it, the solder keeps it essentially level. Here though, while I probably could have soldered it as is, the corner would have been really clearly indented and would have looked terrible. Pro tip: cards make great shims. I went and dug up some old cards I had and used them to raise the pieces of glass up. The nice thing about using cards is that while they're fairly sturdy, they're also thin enough that you can adjust the height of the stack very easily.

The second problem, or rather the second thing that's different from normal stained glass assembly, is that normally there's nowhere for the solder to go. Even if there's a big gap between two pieces, the solder will pool on the table and build up. Not so here, due the pieces being raised up the solder easily leaked through. What I ended up having to do was do the top as best I could, then flip it and do the bottom (since there was already some solder there it couldn't really leak through) and then do the top again, mainly to achieve a consistent look.

The other corner went just as smoothly and before too long the window was good as new.

I went ahead and put holes in the corners, but we're not gonna stick with the suction cup plan.

Making of gallery

hey look at this thing i finished

You know what the problem is with the wingin' it plan?

No wait, scratch that, there are no problems with the wingin' it plan, it is, I'm told, what winners do.

You know what's interesting about the wingin' it plan? Due to the nature of it, it is impossible to predict where it will go. If there is no set end point, then how do I know when to stop? A good example is writing a paper for school. Given that I'm impossibly self critical, I could probably revise a paper endlessly (well, if I knew how to revise better that is) but it has to stop at some point and so turning the paper in becomes the definitive end point. I have an artist friend who says that a piece of his art is not finished until it has made it to it's final home. I always liked that idea. I assume he could probably endlessly tweak his drawerings (I'm not of the impression he does, but he COULD) but it has an end point. So what about when I make things for no reason? What about when I make a stained glass window of an ass, just because I think it's funny?

When we last left our intrepid stained glass maker he had completed the minimum amount of work for the window to be considered done. For reference:

Now, I wasn't entirely sure where to go from here, but I had some ideas. I mentioned at the end of the original post that there were some finishing chemicals I wanted to use. The first was Patina. Patina, in this setting, doesn't refer to the appearance, rather it's the blanket name for a group of chemicals that are used to create an artificial patina. I feel like it would make more sense to call the product artificial patina, but what do I know. As I understand it, it's made from equal parts acid and magic. There are many varieties covering a number of different types of metal, but as far as lead based solder you can get patina that will turn your solder copper or black. I would have liked a wider range of color choices, but still this meant that now I could have three different line colors, which was terribly exciting to me. The layout that made the most sense to me was to make the crack black to imply shadow, make the skin edges copper as that would be pretty similar to the glass and then keep the lines on the underwear silver.

Working with patina is pretty simple if you know what you're doing. It's really as simple as just dipping a brush into it and brushing on where you want the color changed. The color change is pretty instantaneous, but additional brushing can help. One thing that was not apparent to me was to get really good color you need to get a wire brush and go to town on the solder. It needs to be damn shiny before applying the patina. I did the black first as it was a much smaller area.

Worked pretty great, I was pumped. Doing the "skin" was far more problematic. The copper, I've found, is much more finicky, you really need to have a clean surface for it to work well. On top of that, remember when I said the color change was pretty instantaneous? Well after you apply patina you get a cloth rag and wipe off any excess, if you're not careful and you just barely touch a section you didn't want color on, it'll still change enough to be noticeable. Infuriating. I had to scrape off the patina and try again at least twice. Ended up pretty good though.

It's a little hard to tell in that picture since you apparently can't click to zoom in on pictures any more in blogger, but even at a distance I think you can see the difference in color. The other thing I wanted to do was go over it with some finishing compound. Now, this was something sold specifically for stained glass, but I'm not sure if there's anything about it that was special for this. As near as I can tell it's just wax. You cover the window with a light film, then when it dries to a haze you buff it to a high shine. It was really easy and while it's not an incredibly noticeable effect (so not noticeable I didn't deem it worth a picture) it gives it a nice consistent shine. Also, I guess it stops the solder from tarnishing.

The other thing I wanted to do was come up with some way to display it. You may recall at the end of the last past I talked about how my new soldering technique was not ultimate. The nice thing about solder is it re-melts pretty easy, I assume not an infinite number of times, but the one time was all I needed. After painstakingly going over the whole thing again it felt pretty damn sturdy. I felt pretty confident that I could attach a chain or a string or something and hang it without fear that it would fall apart and fall into a shattered pile of dreams. But, there was a problem. In the original post I threw out the idea of making a backlit shadowbox. I didn't have a very compelling reason for that, I think it popped into my head as I was writing the post, so I put it in there. Once it had manifested as such though, it stuck around in my head for awhile. I was lying in bed, I think the very night I posted that in fact, couldn't sleep for some reason, and I figured out how to make it real.

Of course there were nuts and bolts issues. Carpentry is not a skill I am in possession of. I did, however, know that a router was going to be necessary to make the grooves in the wood. I went to the local hardware stores and quickly decided all their routers were too expensive. I needed to goto Harbor Freight.

Harbor Freight, if you're unaware, is a tool store that sells cheap tools, like, really cheap tools. Sure that pretty much necessarily means you're sacrificing quality, but being mainly a hobbyist I don't always need tools that will last a lifetime. When I'm just making this shit up as I go and come under the impression I need a certain tool, I'd rather just by a cheap version and if it turns out to be something I can't live without, I'll upgrade later. The problem with Harbor Freight is that I should never be allowed in there unsupervised. I could pretty easily talk myself into buying half their stock. I came for a router and some cheap clamps and left with a router, a whole lotta cheap clamps, a multimeter, some loupes, some glue and a pin vise, which is so fucking sweet I'm not even sure what to say about it. That, I realize seems not that overboard, but it was a struggle.

Then it was off to Lowes to get some wood. I went with aspen as it was the first wood I found that was in the dimensions I wanted (1x4 or something, I don't remember anymore). Back at home I had the wood, I had the router all I needed now was to magically learn how to use a router. Hmm. Something I've noticed about tools from Harbor Freight is that their owners manuals are for shit. Luckily it seemed like a simple enough tool, just jam it in the wood and make a straight line. So that's what I did!

Apparently I only took one picture of the routed wood (is that the right terminology?). The idea was the top and bottom pieces would have a groove along their entire length and the window would stick out a quarter inch or so, then the side pieces would have a groove that ended a quarter inch or so from the edge so that when the pieces were put together it would be seamless. That was the idea anyway. The problem with these things only existing in my head and sub par measuring is that I run into some problems, more on that in a bit.

All the pieces were cut and route, I sort of fit them around the window and it seemed to match up just right, so I was feeling pretty good. I decided I wanted to paint them, because....I don't know. The thought process was if I painted it white then it would resemble the color of my normal window frames and would almost look like it was one (not that I had, or have, any intention of displaying it). I had some white spray paint laying around, but quickly found out that my new spray pant technique was not ultimate. Luckily there was a bucket of paint in my closet that had been inexplicably left here by the previous tenants, so I bought me a paintbrush! Came out pretty good.

SURE IS WHITE!

The plan was to clamp a side and and end together to make an L, then screw those together, then go from there. I think it probably would have worked fine if I'd done a better job sanding the ends. Since they didn't sit perfectly flat though it ended up making an acute angle instead of a right angle. Not such a big deal since the angle wasn't *that* far off. You know what was a big deal? This:

That's what's known as a zoh noes! moment. I have no idea how my non exact measurements didn't work out, but there's no crying in stained glass window backlit shadowbox making. After firing the router back up it was pretty quick work to just deepen the groove. Of course, shocker of shockers, there was a similar problem when I went to put the other end on.

Same process to fix that. Couple more screws and the box was done except that.....

THE SEAMS LOOKED LIKE SHIT. GODAMNIT. WHY COULDN'T YOU JUST BE FLUSH! Why oh why do artists have to suffer so. /sigh. At least it seemed to be an easy fix, just get some plaster and cover it up. So that's what I did!

I was now in possession of a stained glass window framed in a nice little box. All that was really left was to add some lights. From the start of the project I had decided I was going to go with some cold cathodes. I had modded my xbox 360 a few years ago (retro post forthcoming!) and had looked into using some in that so I had a bit of knowledge to go off of. I bought two twenty inch lights, one for the top and one for the bottom. My dream was that this thing would be reallllllly bright, a shining beacon unto the lord if you will. I was a little underwhelmed, but still.

Everything about that delights me. It's somewhat hard to tell from the picture, but given how transparent the blue parts are, the lack of a back meant you could see right through the thing, wasn't really what I wanted. I got some paper that they put on picture frames. Double sided tape and some precise xacto trimming got me this:

So the final step, displaying it. I was terrified to hang this up as it was now pretty heavy. I spent some time walking around the Hobby Lobby framing department to see if they had anything that seemed especially compelling. What I found was the perfect hang system. It, apparently, is what professionals use and can hold up to fifty pounds. I felt I had to buy it as, I am a professional and would hate to make the label out to be a lier.

This brings us somewhat full circle, the whole wingin' it thing. I had now spent quite a bit of time on something that I had no real intention of ever displaying in my apartment. On top of that it seemed to lack commercial

appeal. I don't know though, I feel like I could see it in a bar. Maybe Cheeks? They're an ass bar right? I bet it'd look something like this.

OH GLOWING ASS, YOU'RE THE ONLY LIGHT IN MY WORLD.

Reminds me of a poem I once heard:

making your way in the world today

takes everything you've got

taking a break

from all your worries

sure would help a lot

wouldn't you like to get away?

sometimes you wanna go

WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAAAA-AAAAME
AND THEY'RE ALWAYS GLAD YOU CAAAA-AAAAME

you wanna be where you can see

troubles are all the same

you wanna be

where everybody knows your name

you wanna go where people know

people aren't all the same

you wanna go

where everybody knows your name.

As always, your making of gallery, featuring bonus shots of the "bar scene." It was pretty hard, the picture was supposed to capture a sense of desperation but then also a glowing ass. Tragically I'm a terrible photographer. Also it's hard doing tripod shots apparently. Also I don't seem to photograph well. Also my table makes for a shitty bar. Feel free to select any of those compelling reasons for any dissatisfaction you might have.