Stained-glass window always fascinated me, and I like to see them when I walk inside a church. It’s of course in these places that we can see them most of the time, but they are also present inside private places, thus catching the light and illuminating the living rooms.
Contemplating the stained glass windows in the churches is a special feeling for me both in the admiration of the work of craftsmen and in the contemplation of an art related to the sacred, the divine, the mysteries.
But what is a stained-glass window?
These are pieces of glass assembled with lead came concerning the prevailing process dating from the Middle Ages. But other techniques have existed since then such as the copper tape technique known as the Tiffany method (named after its inventor Louis Comfort Tiffany), of the glass slab set into cement or silicone, of collage process (with resins or polymers), of thermoforming, of fusing (baking between 750 and 850°C of several superimposed layers of glass, a supporting glass and decorated glasses, to obtain their bonding by fusion) and of free-glass stained-glass window technique, techniques that can be combined.
As much to tell you that when I became acquainted with this training in the Chamber of Trades on which I depend, I rushed to learn this ancestral knowledge.
The trainer, Florence Laugier, whose workshop Sabaidee is in Nice, who has been practicing the art of stained glass for 18 years now, taught us the different steps of stained glass, the good gestures and guided our progress throughout the course. We were also treated to a precious document in picture showing all the steps in detail of stained-glass manufacture so we could go back to it during our next production.
The other trainees and I chose a geometric pattern out of 7.
Here are the most important stained-glass manufacturing steps in this slideshow.