Inspiration comes from the darndest places, sometimes. I was looking at a page of rainbow, equality, and tolerance bumper stickers recently, when one of them really caught my eye. Decided to use it as a starting point to design a rainbow stained glass piece, using the rainbow to be the equality bars in the piece. That, in turn, led to an alternate rainbow stained glass piece also for equality, but in reverse, with the rainbow colors surrounding two clear glass bars to represent equality.

I did a little tweaking on the first pattern. My initial effort was a little too small to be practical, and didn’t look as balanced as I had hoped it could be. Things look a lot different on paper than when they are rendered in glass! I have a tendency to start small and then wind up having to make it bigger. Same thing happened when I made my pattern for the rainbow peace sign, also inspired by something similar I saw on line. I am happy with the second run on this pattern, with borders of equal width, also matching the clear bar in the center. I went with clear glass rather than any color, including white, because I really wanted the rainbow colors to stand on their own. I did use a textured clear glass to give it a touch more depth. The final piece measures 5″ by 7″. Because the red pieces on the ends get sort of short shrift in real estate compared to the others, future constructions of this could easily have a ‘color shift’, where red is one of the main stripes and some other color winds up a little smaller in the shifting of the rainbow.

After getting some feedback on the first test piece (not the one pictured above), there was a suggestion to reverse the equality effect, so that led to this second pattern, which I call reverse equality (I know, not terribly clever, but it’s descriptive). I did this one two very slightly different ways. In one, the right and left full length pieces are all one piece. In the other, I broke those up in to three. Was a little unsure about stability the first way, and I also sort of liked how the break lines looked on paper in the second one. I am satisfied with both and would make both again. I think I like the one with the end pieces cut in three slightly better than the other, but that’s definitely just a personal preference more than anything else. Measuring 5 1/4″ by 6 1/4″, both versions are solid and stable.

So, what do you think?

When I started making cardinals in stained glass in late 2011, my friend, Tracey, asked about stained glass ornaments of red birds. I did not have any at the time and was not able to work on any new patterns before Christmas. Wasting little time, I wanted to get started early on them for this year.

I based these also on the same cardinal photo I used to create the pattern for the cardinals in stained glass. My intention was to make a fairly simple pattern, just a few pieces of glass, so they could made fairly quickly and easily. I am very curious if people like them.

In the end, I wound up with three  sizes, which you can see illustrated in the gallery. The largest seems too large to function as an ornament but would make a lovely suncatcher in a smaller window. I used a different glass on this one than the other two, a brighter red that’s more translucent than transparent. The other two samples were done in red waterglass, which looks lovely in a window with light coming behind, but probably would be too dark to hang on a tree. So, ornaments would likely get made in the brighter red going forward. I also did each in a different patina for variety, with black on the largest, copper for the middle sized, and silver on the smallest. I need to get matching chain and ribbon for copper patina, a finish I actually hadn’t done on anything for a while. Time to stock up! I’d also used a darker brown glass for the beaks on these, and would use the solid black glass going forward.

Thanks for looking, check out more photos in the gallery, enjoy, and please do let me know what you think!

Late last fall, I was asked to make a stained glass cardinal. There are scads of free, and very good, cardinal patterns on line and I downloaded several of them. And then I thought, I have a few pretty good cardinal photos. Let’s see if I can make my own pattern. I did, then made a tweak, and wound up making many which were bought for Christmas/holiday gifts. I’ll cover cardinals again soon in relation to ornament versions  I am also working on.

This all leads up to today’s post. Inspired by the successful cardinal pattern, I decided to go through other bird photos to see what other patterns of my own I could make. I started with hummingbirds. I’ve seen many stained glass hummingbirds on line, in a very impressive array of settings. I am leaning towards the more simple here. I think simple can be equally beautiful. I also had a fair bit of black/grey baroque glass left from making a raven, and thought it would work well to imply the fast beating wings.

As you will see in the album that goes along with this post, I picked two images, and created three patterns. I can already see tweaks I want to make in the patterns. I’ll make the belly part one piece going forward, to avoid a random seam in the middle of the body. On the side view hummers, I’ll do a better curve at the bottom of the belly. I have included the original photos on which the patterns were based, in case anyone is curious. I could do a female version of the front facing hummer, as well. Might have to play with that idea a little. For the beak, because these are not large pieces overall, I have opted for 14 gauge wire. All of the pieces here are finished in black patina. The chain is just a 3 inch length so that the bird does not sit right on top of a suction cup or hook.

I’m hopeful that people will like these as I know hummingbirds are very popular. They have such an interesting variety of colors, too, equaling a wide array of glass options. Please let me know what you think. Thanks!

[Show as slideshow]