Stained Glass and Glass Choices

Welcome to my first blog!

Hello friends, my name is Glenda, welcome to my first blog 🙂 After much deliberation, I decided to start by talking about glass choices. Whether you are a customer buying a piece or an artist creating, it's all about the glass. When I am buying glass for a particular project, I take into consideration four things: Color, opacity, texture and of course cost. There is a lot to say about every one of these things but I'm going to keep it basic and maybe just give some examples to help better explain.

When I make a sunflower, the color yellow I envision is very specific and I don't personally want to see through the petals, so I choose something that is somewhat opaque. Taking that one step further, I want my leaves to be smooth without a texture pattern showing through. Perhaps a better example may be to comparing the fish in the above photo.

The fish on the left has varying degrees of opacity and is textured, where as the one on the far right has glass that is more translucent and the glass is smoother. The one in the middle is a combination of glass but I should point out that the black is completely opaque.

I did also mention cost as a factor so I will briefly talk about the cost of different glasses and how it varies. I'd love to tell you I know why one color blue I buy is $14 a square foot and another that is very similar is $30 or more, but I really have no clue and my vendors are mystified by the pricing as well. Bottom line is, if you need a specific color you have to make a decision; is it worth it to spend the money?

A funny side story here is that I wanted some pink glass and everyone kept pointing me in the direction of bubblegum pink and it was driving me crazy because it wasn't what I wanted. I finally found out why, that's because the color pink I really wanted is crazy expensive so nobody buys it or keeps it in stock. (Sigh!)

For the record, I finally did buy the worlds' smallest piece of pink glass, which I will cherish forever 🙂 Reds (in the same color family) are also very expensive, and you want to know why pinks and reds are expensive, this all due to the fact that Gold is used in the recipe. Why? Because they found it helped the glass to retain it's true color without fading or darkening when exposed to the sun. So, there you have it my cliff notes on stained glass and glass choices. I wonder, will you look at a piece of stained glass differently now?