Here is my photo process of my first ever stained glass piece 🌙 from conception to soldering, and I cant wait to see the final product!!! Im obsessed with this art form!

If you've managed to stumble upon my blog, you may find yourself wondering why I love broken glass so much. In honesty, it's a complicated answer! If you don't care to hear me wax poetic about old stuff, feel free to scroll by. Otherwise, this is why I'm so obsessed with broken glass.

The shorter answers are these:  

1.) My favorite color is the ultramarine blue that can only really be captured in a nice piece of glass.

2.) I adore the look of glass in the sun!

3.) I've always wanted to have something that was really old. Some people have antiques from their great great great grandma in their attic! I have a boombox from the early 2000s. Needless to say, I've always been a little envious.

The long answer is this story.

Part of it is some intrinsic love for shiny things. Ever since I was really young, I've picked up scraps and shards of broken shiny things from my back yard, in parks, and along the sides of roads (which I did very carefully!). My collection was mostly made up of rocks, metal and plastic, and pieces of broken beer bottles.

One day, my passive habit of collecting turned into a real passion. At the beginning of the pandemic, I had to distance learning, including distance PE. This drove me out of the house and to a nearby place I could walk in. There was a small area off the beaten path that I loved to be to clear my head and mark off the needed PE hours. One day as I was walking, my eye was caught by a brilliant piece of teal glass. I was immediately struck by its color but was ultimately drawn in by its unique shape. It was one of many scattered pieces that I found more of with every visit. The pieces began to fit together and shortly after, my grandfather identified it as a telephone pole insulator.

I had no idea this would be the beginning. It seemed like a fleeting joy as I ran out of pieces to find each visit. I distinctly remember my weighing disappointment when the shards had seemingly all been collected after weeks of searching.  

Some time later, still in the midst of quarantine, my dad and I began to take longer walks to pass the time in the warmer months. It just so happened that a different park had another area off the beaten path that we felt drawn to explore. You couldn't believe my excitement when I found the ground littered with pieces of glass.  

The next time we went, I brought a messenger bag. This time, we b-lined to the glass patch and explored it further. I was so excited as I frantically picked up pieces, admired them, and stuffed them into the bag. As I joyfully picked up tiny scraps of glass, my dad shouted from a distance.

"You need to come here!"

I wish I could describe to you how excited I was as my dad helped me dig out fully intact bottles from the dirt. The hill of the alcove was riddled with bottles of every shape and color. I excitedly collected them and took them home to clean them.

Many trips later, I had found a routine, technique, and passion in the collecting. I had various broken pieces, but I had entire bottles in green and blue and lavender, teacups, pottery, china, metal vessels, telephone pole insulators, lightbulb pieces, and a bottle of perfume with perfume still in it. By this point, I knew these things were old, but I had no idea how old they really were.

Until a faithful day this summer. For the first time in all my collecting, I found a piece with enough words to search when the piece was from! This glass was part of a Platts Chlorides bottle from the 1890s. To say the least, I freaked out! I had to be sure that all my pieces were from that time, so I did a little digging using the date I had found for the other piece, along with a distinct feature or two from the piece I was searching for.

Sure enough, the two things I looked for came back from the same era! I found that I had a soda bottle from 1927, and a pie plate from 1916! Suddenly the weight (physical and metaphorical) of all my glass became apparent. I was suddenly in possession of hundreds of antiques.  

After that, I began to identify more and more pieces. I identified uranium glass (pictured earlier on my feed), the perfume bottle, and loads of others, and I continue to do so!