Here are some of the stained glass windows I've made.  It's a fun hobby.   One thing to keep in mind when you look at these pictures though is that it's hard to get a true color when you photograph stained glass.  Factors like sunlight and flash and exactly where the window is placed all effect the colors that come out in the pictures.  It's always best to use your imagination a little or to see a piece in person if you want a real idea of what it looks like.  

 If you'd like to email me about any piece here or anything else, I'd love to hear from you.  There will soon be others, which I may put in here to "show off" my efforts.  Use the email link to the left and let me know what you'd like to know about.

This one is maple leaves falling from the sky into a pile, or maybe floating in water.  This has a lot of small pieces, I think the whole thing has 98 pieces actually.  

This is one of my new favorites.  It's three canna flowers against the blue sky.  I used one of my favorite kinds of glass for the sky, and the same kind but different color for the leaves.  I really like doing flowers and leaves.  They're not very abstract but I like them anyway.

Recently someone asked if I could make them a butterfly and a Chinese dragon so they could give them as gifts.  I said I could do a butterfly but not a dragon.  So she and her husband talked it over and got back to me and said they wanted a dragon.  So I said I couldn't do one but could do a butterfly.  So a few days later she got back to me and said they talked it over and decided on the dragon.  So I figured I'd go ahead and give it a try.  Here's what came out of that....

I did a the following for the director of the Shenandoah Taiji Center.  I loved making this and it's one of my favorites I've done so far.  The design is both simple and complicated and it took me a long time to figure it out.  I might have even learned a thing or two in the process about what it means too.  The "yin yang" symbol is in front of colors of the five elements of kung fu.  It's all about balance you know...

My mother-in-law is an artist and one of our favorite of her paintings is an abstract one.  I decided I'd try to do it in glass just for kicks  This is almost an exact replica of her painting and I think it worked pretty OK.  She was pleased too.

My mother collects angel stuff.  I don't particularly like angel stuff, so instead of making her the standard kind of angel stuff she likes, I made this sort of odd thing.  It's a wing mostly with a little shoulder on the side.  Sort of a thought piece maybe.  Haha, it amused me anyway and it's hanging in her angel room now.

This next one has been nearly impossible to get a shot of.  The glass is three different kinds of green and the only time you can really see some of it is when the sun is beating down on it.  The problem with that is that it's almost impossible to get a picture of that with the sun beating in on it, so just use your imagination.  There's three levels of leaves here, each with their own color.  I think of it as rhodendron leaves in a frozen pond.  

Intertwining stripes are something seen in stained glass a lot.  I enjoyed making this window and tried to pick glass that would look good both in the day and in the night.  That's the thing I try to keep in mind, the sun doesn't always shine, so a piece should have a look and personality for both of those situations.   

Also, as I enjoyed this design, I redid it in different colors, again picking glass that would look different (or even better) in the night.  These round pieces are a bit of a challenge and a lot of fun.

Not all stained glass is for windows.  It can be used for lampshades, candleholders, lanterns or any other thing really.  In this picture I made panels for a chandelier in my hall.  This is a very simple design, sort of like a stylized flower maybe.  I used clear glass in red, green, purple, orange and clear.  Now the room has a nice rosy glow at night when this light is on.

When I was a kid I was lucky to spend a lot of time in art galleries.  My grandmother and I would wander through the Hirshorn and the National Gallery with our sketchpads and draw any painting that struck our fancy.  Sometimes we'd go home and try to recreate them too.  Some of my favorites from this time were those like these next windows.  Mondrian, Lichtenstein and others explored this sort of  geometrical shape art and I loved it.  I saw this design somewhere and loved it and made several changes to it before I made it myself.  Actually I made it three times, twice in the colors of the top one but in different sizes and once in the colors of the bottom one.  It's a fascinating design to watch throughout the day due to the glass I used in it.  

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I made this next piece for my aunt.  I made a very stylized flower and tried to cleverly "overlap" pieces of glass to come up with a new color.  They aren't really overlapped at all, it's all seperate pieces, I just wanted to make the obvious color meld here to amuse myself.  Again, it's hard to get the colors true.  The flower is true but the background is a pale purple with white clouds in it.  Below this giant flower is the full window taken in day and at night.  The colors are amazingly different between day and night aren't they?

This is one of my new favorites.  I did it for a good friend of mine and his family.  He told me his wife liked sunflowers, so I thought I'd make one for them.  I couldn't resist tossing in a little flavor from where I live though, and did it in the style of some of the thangkas that I collect.  In a lot of my thangkas, there are sets of three mountains.  I like that idea and have strong attachments to mountains, so I figured I'd slip in three blue mountains (I live in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia).  The frame is from some wood I ripped off the side of my barn for this purpose.

And last on the page here, and my favorite piece, is something I did for my front door.  Below are two different pieces, both the same idea, that flank my front door.  In the daylight, the atrium where these sit has a peaceful greenish glow, and I think that gives the room a very nice feel.  (Also, the chandelier pictured above sits in this area too, so the room has a peaceful greenish glow in the daytime and a warm rosy glow at night from the chandelier!) Each panel is about 10 inches wide and 9.5 inches high.   I enjoyed making these, and they occupied me for about a month.