Summer is upon us, and with Summer comes Baseball. I myself am not the biggest fan of baseball. Partly that's because our local team (Washington Nationals) are horrible. More importantly, I grew up in Texas where football is King. And besides, all those baseball statistics always seemed a bit too much like math homework and that just aroused my suspicions.Oddly though, I do find that I quite enjoy minor league baseball. And my nephews love baseball. Their love of the game inspired today's pattern and that pattern uses the technique that is the focus of today's entry.
As stained glass artists, we can frequently find ourselves in a situation where we desire additional lead-line details on a piece but we either don't really need to cut the glass for construction purposes or it would foolish or impossible to try to cut the glass in a way that would create the needed foil pattern. One easy way of getting around this problem is the use of copper foil overlay.
One of the reasons that soldering works is that that hot solder will stick to fluxed copper foil but not glass. Copper foil sticks to the glass because of the adhesive backing added by the manufacturer. However, as anyone who has done stained glass will tell you, if your burnishing wasn't effective or if the adhesive has become denatured due to excess heat, exposure to air or chemicals then the foil will simply peel off the glass. Normally this isn't a problem because the foil is wrapped around the outside edge of a piece of glass and is sandwiched between two different pieces of glass on the sides. This arrangement means that once the solder is in place, the foil won't be going anywhere. One the outside edges of a finished pattern is where many people run into difficulties. This is the most common region for foil to peel off a finished piece.
The same thing would easily happen if you simply applied copper foil to the flat side of a piece of glass and added solder. After only a short time, the adhesive would give way and the foil overlay would fall off.
The solution to this problem is simple. Always make sure that the foil overlay either continues over the side of a piece and terminates in the gap between glass pieces OR that the overlay intersects a tradition solder line OR another overlay piece that does one of the previous two actions.
Let's look at this baseball pattern again but with pattern numbers visible.
Using traditional construction methods, it would be impossible to create the stitching on the baseball between pieces 6 & 11 or between pieces 11 & 12. Yet, by creating a simple series of dutchmen (false pieces of copper foil or lead) you can easily create the effect.Once all of your pieces are cut, foiled and laid out but prior to soldering them together, just cut and place a series of foil pieces in the locations where the stitches should be. Use your hobby knife to trim the edges into nice, rounded tips that look more like real stitches. Then solder that side as you would normally do.
Once the first side is soldered, flip your piece over. Be sure to clean off the area that will have the stitches on the second side prior to applying foil. Some flux may have seeped through from the first side and this will interfere with the foil adhesion.
Of course, there is another way to do this. You can also combine pieces 6, 11 & 12 into a single round piece. Then you can use foil overlays to create both the arcs and the stitching.
You can download the pattern in several formats:
- Simple Baseball in GlassEye 2000 (.eye) format
- Simple Baseball in JPG format
- Simple Baseball in PDF format
All of the downloads are sized for a small 6 x 6 pattern that you can then enlarge to suit your needs.
I've suggested the following types of glass but you should use glass that suits your artistic sense the best:
- Bullseye 0164 - Egyptian Blue Opal
- Bullseye 0145 - Jade Green Opal
- Spectrum 200S - White Opal
- Spectrum 25072S - Opalized Red
- Spectrum 21572S - Opalized Adobe Amber
- Spectrum 100A - Clear Artique
You'll notice that I've selected opalescent glass for the primary design elements of the piece. That was a stylistic choice on my part to make them stand out more from the clear background. You of course are welcome to change that to suit your needs.
The design is Copyright 2009, Phillip Curtis McKee, III. I grant you, my readers, the limited license to make this pattern into stained glass as many times as you'd like. The only thing I do not allow you to do is to recreate this pattern for the purposes of selling it or including it in a publication of your own.
