nothingugly

I found this gem at Urban Ore. I find their marked prices to be offensively high, but they do dicker. I’d imagine more so now that the housing boom went phut. This piece was marked at $200, (over an older tag for $1000). I got it for a hundred bucks. It’s clearly art nouveau, and it’s not new. It’s foil, so it’s not THAT old. Hand blown clear glass (I can’t tell if the coloured glass is hand done). The ring and post design looks like a Greene and Greene bungalow detail. I’ll need to restore it (I’ve got the local glass vendor hunting for a match for the clear glass). It’ll likely end up inside my pocket doors. Miss p. added for scale. It’s four and a half feet in diameter.

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I finally completed the rework of the oak tree project that I started back in may. The color choices weren’t working for me, so I redid much of the glass. I think the textured lead worked out well.

PDF and DWG oak tree stained glass patterns.

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I’ve been bashing my brains all day thinking about lighting fixtures. One thought is that lighting fixutres are closer to pure sculpture than anything else I”ve made. They don’t require lots of internal structure (say, to hold up a tabletop, or a seated human), and they have to let light out. That’s really it, in terms of hard requirements. LOTS of options. I’m adding a little bit of lighting porn to this post - stuff that I love. But both of the fixtures that I love aren’t terribly good in terms of actual lighting - they’re quite dim, really. (One is Greene and Greene from the Thorsen house, and one is a 2/3 scale Frank Lloyd Wright replica by Prairie Designs) .

So. The design I’m working on now is something that would work well with the LEDs. This means it needs a heat sink, which is a bit of a blessing. The more constraints there are on design, the easier it is. I’d like to make a round lampshade, and it would be nice if it were semi opaque. To offset all the maple, glass, and metal in my kitchen design, I’d like it to have a warm tone, and round is good. Where the heck can I get a round red glass cylinder? I was going to use bottles; bottle cutters are readily available. But I think the real answer is that I’ll need to re-purpose some glassware. I’ll spray the inside with a translucent white paint (so it’ll reflect white, and only show minimally from a side view). Mount the whole thing around an aluminum disc for a heat sink (more than adequate - a 2 1/4″ diameter sink will support a 4 watt Luxeon K2), devise a support for the whole thing to hang together, and that should do it. Now, I need to find a source for aluminum discs, and hope that the bottle cutter does what I want it to. I’m also a little iffy on the paint - needs to stick to glass, and be thin enough to be translucent. Hmm.

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The tree is rendered in solid lead, lots of texturing. I’m not enjoying the color choices right now; maybe it’ll look better when I see it in the sun. If not, I’ll replace most of it with something more subdued. Ugh, that was a lot of work.

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Here’s half of the gate. That’s stained glass and cedar fenceboards framed in by 4×4 posts. It’ll be frame and panel construction. Now I need to figure out how much this thing will weigh. My astute neighbor pointed out that cedar loves to suck up water. So, while it’s nice and dry, it’ll weigh between 150 and 250 lbs, but when wet, it might double that. I’ll publish the pattern as a proper stained glass pattern once it has been adapted. It’s shamelessly ripped off from a reconstruction of “Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street Tearooms”, as cited in “Art Nouveau, 1890-1014″ by Paul Greenhalgh.

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