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The lovely stained glass window artist McElf is quite the busy bee up in Buffalo! Lucky for us (and you) she’s taking lots of progress pictures along the way – and since we LOVE progress – here’s a sneak peek of what’s happening *right now* in her studio:
The glass arrived! Here’s the amazing crate job, not leaving anything to chance when it comes to transporting glass:
Okay, okay. That was a teaser. Here’s a sneak peak of some of the unpacked glass. Scrumptious:
McElf working in her studio on the cartoon, aka the full size pattern. What a great drafting table!
Cartoon complete, and testing out some of the glass:
The curved forms! The window will be built on top of these, and then they’ll be used to transport the completed window to Philly:
Attaching the cartoon to the forms, and laying out some pieces:
We are so excited to watch the magic unfold!
It is a big step to be “done” with the design of the stained glass window but now starts the real work of fabrication! And it is going to be a lot of hard work. Full size templating, cutting the glass, bending the glass, banding, assembling, soldering, etc… each done one piece at a time!
McElf got the delivery of all the glass and materials this weekend and ordered the radiused template that she will build on.
She also ordered the outer layer of curved glass that will eventually protect the window from the outside and give a little more thermal performance.
Of course design is never done until things are actually built (we are still tweaking the text), but overall we are really happy with where we ended up. It is a true collaborative piece that is of the house!
As you may know, we incorporated the seashells from our living room fireplace mantel into the new stain glass window design. So as an extra challenge we are going to cast a mold of the actual tile to help McElf cast new shells in glass for the window!
So first we taped off the areas we did not want to get covered in plaster and made a little dam out of clay right below the tile. Before the plaster is applied, we will also apply a mold release solution of liquid soap and water to help in the later removal.
For the mold we used hydrocal plaster because it sets up fast, is harder than plaster of paris, and I had some leftover in the basement from when I used to do sculpture (back when we had time for such things).
Molding on a vertical surface is more challenging. I had to wait for it to begin to set up otherwise it would fall right off but that limited the working time once it began to set up. The work of applying it was done mostly down by hand with a little help from a spackle knife.
So here it is being applied and beginning to dry.
After letting the plaster set up for about an hour it was time to pop them off!
And now we have a negative mold of shells! The plaster picks up all the details exactly as they are in the old Victorian tiles.
So here they are all done.
Right after this we carefully packed them up, took them to the post office and shipped them to Buffalo NY to McElf’ studio. Can’t wait to see the glass shells that are to be made from these!
To start our day we had a little visitor while eating breakfast by the garden… (just wait for the bird feeder project!)
We finally go back to woodworking today (…a lot more fun than spackling). Here is the new sill for the front window. To get enough thickness we had to laminate two boards, then rounded over the edges on the router table and lastly the cut itself is always a bit tricky.
Next we cover over the old jamb extensions with new oak.
Then started applying casing and the apron… There is obviously a little more to go so stay tuned.
The apron was also two boards glued up and cut to match the orginal profile.
In the kitchen I also got back to the basement door. I sanded the jambs to expose the old wood to be stained with the new casing. The inside of the frame beyond the (to be reinstalled) stop will remain painted.
The drywall around the door is smooth, flat, level, and done! And soon to be painted…
So that was it for our restful Sunday!
More spackling in the kitchen:
We primed all the fresh drywall and spackle:
We foamed (Great Stuff) around the front window so we can start trimming the window tomorrow…
That is … On the basement door since the Living Room trim will wrap the corner into the kitchen.
We have yet to decide what to do with this door but either way the frame needs to be patched in.
And the frame needed to be packed out slightly to even out the wall and trim.
Unfortunately one side was high and the other two low so I had to fill in the wall… For this we used the powdered joint compound because the premix stuff would never dry.
When done the two corners and trim will all be aligned and it worked out nicely to even be parallel with the floor joints…
McElf has sent us over a dozen versions of our window in the last few days tweaking and perfecting each element… getting the blue ribbons just right, adjusting the size of the torch, adding more to the center supporting element, etc
So we posted them all up on our office blackboard wall and stood back to look.
We went through circled the options we liked best and of course did some sketching and tweaks of our own.
It has been a really fun and collaborative design process but of course it has to end soon…
This was version 12 from McElf which is very close. What do you think of moving the dates to side and placing Madison Square in the middle? Maybe it should read madisonsquare.wordpress.com! That is probably too long, we will just have to buy madisonsquare.com!
A little more sketching and a little more CAD and we are there…
And the big part… construction, can begin! The materials have been ordered.
We are trying to keep this project going forward amid all of the other life obligations … We did get a few things done this weekend. There was some more sanding & spackling….
The door jamb got packed out in Oak for the new trim.
And a few more corner blocks got stripped in the slow cooker.
They still need sanding but this method is so much easier than the heat gun!
And of course there were a few things done on the stain glass window. McElf is getting set up to start fabricating in the near future.
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