Read along....
Anyone who has encountered the beautiful stained glass windows displayed in Cathedrals, will have marveled at the glorious colours of glass and the skill of the craftsmen. Today more and more people are discovering these skills for themselves. In the past, plain glass was painted with special glass paints which actually stained the glass when fired. This is why the term "stained glass" came into being. This is different to just painting on glass with glass paints as is used today. This is just a cheap copy of the real stained glass. Today coloured glass panels, lampshades etc are made using factory produced coloured glass which are cut to size, manually according to the design and then put together. In the early days, glass pieces had to be put together with thick lead channels, soldered together. Lead by it very nature cannot be bent for very small piece, so instead the details were painted in on larger pieces of glass, fired to make it permanent and then leaded.
Towards the end of the 19th century the American architect and designer 'Loise Comfort tiffany', changed the way stained glass looked and the way it was made. His craftsmen in the Tiffany studios in America found that the traditional lead was too inflexible to handle tiny pieces of glass, so instead they wrapped each piece of glass in a thin strip of copper before assembling and soldering it. This enabled them to make highly detailed and intricate designs in glass, especially the famous lamps, which are synonymous with Tiffany's name. Copper foiling has become one of the most popular methods of assembling glass in recent years, and its versatility allows you to create a variety of decorative household objects with glass especially three dimensional ones.
