Cheddar News checked in from Craftsman Ave, a do-it-yourself workshop in Brooklyn, NY, to learn the art of stained glass-making.

<div class="block">Cheddar News checked in from Craftsman Ave, a do-it-yourself workshop in Brooklyn, NY, to learn the art of stained glass-making.</div>

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Learning the Art of Stained Glass Making

I'm here at Craftsman Ave, which is a do it yourself workshop space here in Brooklyn. And you can do a variety of different activities. And as you pointed out today, I'm doing stained glass. I'm here with Sara, who's gonna show us how to make your own stained glass ornament. Thanks so much for joining us. So, first off, what is Craftsman Ave and kind of what other activities can you do here? Well, Craftsman Ave is this vibrant community um craft making space where, where we teach um students, I'm honored, crafting skills like um knife making, barrel making. And today I'm so excited to show you how to make stained glass. OK? So this whole process usually takes hours, but you did help prep me with this and we're gonna start, we're gonna make this stained glass Martini ornament, which I'm super excited for. So walk me through kind of the steps that you would take if you had the full class. How does it all start? So you first start with designing your piece and you draw it out number each piece and then the fun part is choosing your colors. OK. So how do you choose your glass. Well, it depends on what you want to highlight and not. And we, we do have different types of glass, transparent, opaque, and textured. And sometimes you can really get um inspired just like looking at certain colors. If you can start with choosing the glass first, then it's the design will come out. OK. And then what happens next? So after that, you, you make a copy of your master pattern, you cut it out and you glue it on pieces of glass depending on the color that you chose. And then after that, we go into cutting glass. How do you cut glass? Like? Is it really difficult? Is it easy to do? Well, we still use the same tools that was used back in the day, which is nice. Um This is pretty much a, a glass cutter with um uh a disk inside and you're cutting it as if you're cutting pizza. OK. So it's actually, I thought it would be much more difficult. Yeah, when you're cutting glass, you're not literally cutting glass, you are creating a controlled score and then you like, you wanna crack it after using other tools or sometimes we just like decent stuff like that. Very simple. So this whole process of cutting your glass to us, how many hours would that take? So the formula is, each piece of glass is one hour over it from start to finish because it does involve a lot of process. After cutting it, you would use a grinder to finesse the shape. And then we're, I'm gonna talk about uh copper file technique. Cool. And we're gonna get more into the copper foil technique later. How did you get in the stained glass? Well, I apprenticed for a lamp making company called Friend of all in Brooklyn. And ever since I just fell in love with it and I've been doing it for seven years now. Yeah, here's some of your works right here. What inspires you? Well, a lot of it is inspired by my immigration story glass is such a good um avenue to tell visual and colorful narratives and I do love color texture and a slight leaning to the absurd. Well, thanks so much for sharing your story with us and coming up next, we're gonna talk more about the copper foil technique used in Tiffany lamps and I'll show you how we're gonna put the whole finished product together. Back to you guys in the studio.