When
we built our house, the lot to our left was still empty. There is a
window in the master bathroom that looks out over the then-empty lot.
The plan was: use a towel as a curtain until the neighboring lot was
filled with a house (because our houses are close enough together that the neighbor's house would block anyone from seeing into our bathroom window), and then replace the towel with a sheer curtain to
let the morning light in.
I was elated when they broke ground
next door... I was finally going to get morning rays in my bathroom!
However, as the walls came up, much to my dismay, there was a hole in
the wall right outside our bathroom window. The neighbors had designed
their house with a wondow off their master bedroom that looks directly
into our bathroom! Honest mistake and a HUGE design flaw. It put me in
quite a pickle. I was forced to scrap my idea and come up with a
window covering that would give us privacy without completely blocking
the light.
My
mom was down visiting for the day and we found ourselves at Hobby Lobby
(she's just as crafty as I am. Guess I come by it honest). We were
staring at the paint section where there was an entire array of glass
paint for designing your own stained glass look. Ingenious! She bought
me a book entitled, "The
Ultimate Guide to Glass Decorating" by Jan Cumber so I could
experiment and see if I liked the results.
Experiment? Puh! My mom
doesn't know me very well. I've never been the personality type to try
something or attempt to perfect a technique before creating; I've been
the "jump in 100% and pray you don't land on your face" kind of person.
One time she asked me why I tended to leap without looking and I told
her it was because God always caught me. Any whooo. I poured over the
book for a week, imagining how it would work, and dreaming up my own
window design. With very little extra money in our account, I needed to
get this right on the first try so I didn't waste money on unnecessary
supplies.
The design I finally came up with was drafted from the picture
on p.105 of "The
Ultimate Guide to Glass Decorating". It was a simple layout with
mostly straight lines and forms I could easily free-hand, eliminating
the need to first paint the design on a flat piece of glass laid over a
pattern and then transfer it to the surface of the window.
I
already had my pattern sketched on a small sheet of paper, so I lined
the window with masking tape and began marking the tape with the outline
of my design. Next, I used a sheet of carbon paper to draw the pattern
directly onto the window. This step was tedious because one slip of
the carbon paper would smear the lines I had already drawn. Once my
basic pattern was drawn onto the window, I used the leading strips I had
purchased at Hobby Lobby and began giving the window some definition.
In the book, there are instructions on how to make your own leading
strips, but I found the leading strips very easy to use. They are
sticky, so they cling to the glass immediately, and once you place the
strips on the window the glue doesn't set up for a few seconds, giving
you time to adjust the form before it officially sticks good and tight.
The joints where the leading strips meet are never going to be exactly
flush, but that's okay because these places get "soldered" with leading
paint designed to hold everything together and make it appear relatively
seamless. It took several days to get the entire design completely set
and ready to paint.
The painting process was extremely
fun! Experimenting with different squiggles and lines was amazing
because there was no need to be exact about anything. The flaws and
different thicknesses of paint gave the window character! I picked
paint colors to coordinate with our bathroom colors... all earth tones.
The hardest part was waiting for it to dry. Like I said earlier, I
tend to rush into things and I won't stop working until the project is
complete, but this forced mew to slow down. While our little angel was
napping, I would escape to our bathroom where I would paint a couple
more sections. The last step was dabbing on etching medium in areas I
wanted to appear opaque. Super easy and gives a pretty neat effect!
The
project, from conception to completion, took about two weeks. It's not
perfect, but it's pretty dang good... even with taking into
consideration that it was my first attempt!
Leading strips- $12 a pack
(I ended up having to send my husband out for another pack, which I
only used a couple out of, so I will have left-overs for the next
project)
Liquid ledding- $12
Window paint- $7 a bottle (I had
four colors but ending up using two bottle of crystal clear, so five
bottles total)
Etching medium- $10
Carbon
paper-$4
Grand Total- Right at $100 with paint and leading strips left
over for the next project! During this project, I went back to Hobby
Lobby and purchased "Creations
On Glass" because I liked the window on the cover... but that's an
entirely different blog.
Happy painting!
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| Please visit my website www.AshleyGesslerSHD.com |
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