Stainless Steel Glass Whatsit

 Way back last July, Carl came in the house with a piece of stainless steel scrap from a job he'd been working on.  The scrap steel was 9" wide by 18" tall and 1" thick with four vertical openings resembling a window pane cut out.  I wish I'd taken a before picture, but once again, I've dropped the ball. A picture is worth a thousand words, but I'll try to keep it well below the limit.

"What do you think we should do with this?" he asked as he carefully set it down on the kitchen floor.  "Do you have any ideas?"

As it turned out, I did have an idea for the impossibly heavy hunk of metal.  At first I thought it would make an interesting frame for a stained glass panel for the garden.  I sat down to draw up a design but the vertical lines were too narrow to accommodate anything floral.  (You know me, I'm all about the flowers.) 

While I was poking around in our stained glass scraps, I found some glass globs in assorted shapes and sizes stashed in an ice cream pail.  Most of the globs came with some supplies we had purchased from a stained glass artist who had given up the craft.  I was never really sure what I would do with them at the time, but the time had come.

I decided to attempt an abstract stained glass design.  The spaces were just right for squares, rectangles and circles of varying sizes.  I laid the entire design out on the light table in the dining room, gingerly putting the thirty pound hunk of stainless on the surface without breaking the glass underneath. I puttered around with the shapes for a week or two at night, trying various configurations.

This process of putzing was similar to the way we created the big round window for Castle Aaargh; there was no design, just a whole bunch of random scrap glass in varying shapes.

Castle Aaargh's Round Scrap Window 2014

 I admit that the round window came out much better than either of us anticipated.   This was the first window we ever made without a pattern; the shapes we had to work with formed their own pattern.  I wasn't as optimistic about the Stainless Steel Glass Whatsit, but what the heck?  Might as well try something new.  It's all basically scraps anyway.

Once I had the glass shapes placed in the vertical panes, I took a few days to wrap copper foil around each of them.  Many of the glass jewels were quite thick, so the process took longer than I anticipated, which is fine because foiling is my favorite part of the craft of stained glass.  I find it very relaxing to sit down with a bucket of glass and a good movie.  

Carl took over with the soldering when I was done foiling everything.  We weren't sure if the solder would adhere to the stainless steel or not, but surprisingly there were no problems.    At one point the entire project was tipped over by accident, so many of the pieces were dislodged before they were soldered, but to tell the truth,  I guess it didn't matter very much.  Behold my first attempt at abstract stained glass:

Carl had finished soldering this together late last fall, and I put off doing the clean up on the project for various reasons.   It had been moved from the front porch to the dining room floor and finally to the basement for the holidays where Carl plopped it into a wastebasket.   Neither of us were totally thrilled with the end result, no stained glass work ever looks promising especially covered in soldering paste and flux in a gooey mess.  I had chalked it up to an experiment and a learning experience; not anything I was likely to repeat.

 This week I went to empty the wastebasket and found the Whatsit again; it was very cold outside, nothing else was happening, might as well take my mind off my troubles and start the cleaning and detailing process.

Flush side

One side of the Whatsit is flush with the surface, but the other side is recessed into the 'panes' of the stainless steel piece.

Recessed side

The cleaning process took me most of the day and a night of movie watching, by all rights, a window or lamp should be cleaned as soon as possible after soldering, but with us, that doesn't always happen.  I have a set of dental picks that are great tools for detailing stained glass.

At first we had been underwhelmed by the way Whatsit turned out, but when I propped it up in the dining room window and the late afternoon sun streamed through it reminded me of stained glass chipped 'slab' windows installed in some churches and mausoleums. 

  All in all, this was an experiment that we may try again.  Using two different mediums was actually quite fun.  I'm not sure how or where we will display the Whatsit, but I'm sure Carl will think of something. 

In a way, life is a lot like these windows, sometimes you're given pieces of the puzzle and you don't know how any of them fit in the big picture.

 When life throws us scraps, all we can do is arrange things the best we can.  Maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong, but one thing is for certain, at least we tried.