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.
 This
totally opaque pantry door stained glass was commissioned by a very
nice couple in Missouri. They had been living with the arched hole in
their pantry
door for quite a while because they were not satisfied with the quality
of the workmanship exhibited by the stained glass artisans that they
had encountered. I'm not sure what caused them to search online and
find me, but they loved my work and my web site, and were eager to go
ahead with this commission as soon as they communicated with me.
They
sent me an image of an oil painting that they wanted adapted for
this pantry door stained glass artwork. They also wanted the quotation
from Psalm 107:9 that you can see in the image. This was an ideal
situation for vinyl lettering because the amount of the lettering and
the small size of the letters would not have looked as good if done any
other way.
After I
did an initial rendition of the oil painting, they helped me to
catch a few mistakes... things I had failed to assess correctly in the
painting. Although I tried to color the drawing I did for them
accurately, I knew that using all opaque glasses (because of no
lighting inside the pantry) would make picking the final glasses
tricky. They trusted me to select the glasses as I was cutting out the
glass pieces. Afterwards, we decided to re-cut a few of the pieces to
improve the final look.
This
panel is copper-foiled. It measures about 19" wide by 50" tall.
Everything other than the glass has been darkened with a black patina.
 UPDATE
In the winter
of 2020, I was again contacted by these clients. They had moved to a
new home and taken this pantry door stained glass with them, hoping to
use it in a new pantry door. They asked me to enlarge this stained
glass so that it would fit the new opening. I wanted to come up with an
enlargement that wouldn't look like an enlargement. It was fortunate
that I discovered that I still had enough of the original glasses to do
this. The result is shown here.
Below are photos of the enlargement process.
 Although
a lot of careful planning went into matching the colors and the
direction of the grain in the glass pieces shown here, I decided to
recut about six pieces of glass in order to improve the match even more.
 And here is
the original panel laid out within the enlargement and ready to solder.
Copper foiling a complex panel such as this often leaves a bit of space
between the pieces of glass. I came up with the idea of filling these
small spaces by flattening some lengths of zinc came into multi-layered
strips of zinc. These strips perfectly filled the gaps
just outside the purple border along both sides and bottom of the
panel. This made everything fit tightly prior to soldering, which
strengthened the finished panel significantly.
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