A Real Work of Art - in our house!

"A real work of art" is how my other half described it -or more accurately, them. We have just replaced two opaque bits of glass in a bedroom door with two specially commissioned contemporary style items of leaded stained glass. I think we'd had the idea a while ago but, like so many ideas, it has taken a long time for it to come to fruition. That is often how I do things, I guess - at least it usually means that the final thing is perfect but equally often, it dies a death.

The panels in question are in the standard old four-panel pine door to a north facing bedroom. I guess that the old wooden panels were replaced a long time ago in a bid to shed some light on the stairs which otherwise have no natural light. The glass used was about 4mm thick and one side has vertical grooves to distort the image from the outside. The trouble was that it was impossible to get old paint and varnish off the edges and especially from out of those grooves, so they always looked dirty. Interestingly, the plain side of those glass panels is actually wavy, so I have no idea how old they are.

Strictly the new windows are coloured and leaded glass (and not painted glass), but everyone calls this "stained glass". Here are some photos of what we now have and the old glass.

It's quite difficult to get a decent photo from the stairwell, but the left picture shows the colours cast on the door surround, and they also appear on the yellow clay paint of the stairwall.

The old panes, removed without breakage!

This shows the wavy nature of the old glass.

Thanks to Themis Mikellides at Bath Aqua Glass who made the windows for us.