A Hundred Hands and 2014, the year that was :)

2014 was great for Glasshopper and me. I had just begun my work at the studio from June 2014 after almost a three year break and the lovely sisters Mala and Sonia Dhawan from A Hundred Hands offered to a membership of the most prestigious NGO supporting handmade art and artists in India. It is a non-profit trust who supports and works with the artists directly, supporting some artists by helping them showcase their work and earn their livelihood.

So I knew that the membership to A hundred hands also means an opportunity to showcase my work at their Anuual Handmade Collective. The year 2014 was the year of the 5th Handmade collective and the venue was one of the most beautiful Church in Bangalore, The Saint Andrews Church.

Saint Andrews was completing 150 years and the celebrations were grand. Amidst these celebrations, the pastor and the members of the Church were generous enough to share the Church space and premises for the Handmade Collective. I was asked by Mala if I will be able to donated a little stained glass article to the Church on behalf of A hundred Hands family and I was more than delighted :) What a lovely way to says thank you to the Church and also for me it was an opportunity to see my stained glass article hung in the beautiful Church that was over 150 years old :)

More so, The magnificent Church has an original staiend glass panel that throws in beautiful and warm shades of morning sunlight into the Church and it is as old as the Church itself. So my tiny stained glass Cross (Yes, I made and donated a blood red coloured Cross) was to be hung in the same Church across the stained glass panel of the Church :)

An original design, I made a Cross with a white dove soldered onto it. It measured almost 12 inches by 17 inches and looked beautiful with or without natural/artificial light.

A big thanks to the team of A hundred hands for this opportunity to gift my work and all the appreciation i recieved after this piece was hand crafted by me.

More about the Handmade Collective, the bazaar and the various artists who came under one roof to showcase their artwork in my next post :)

The history of 'stained glass'.

All about Original Stained Glass!

A little history about "Original Stained Glass" put together by me for Glasshopper and for all the readers.

Read along....

 ......And God said, "Let there be light". And Man used this light to his own advantage. Man needed shelter but he found this to be dark, so he made windows to let in the light. As time progressed, man being a creative being, built huge cathedrals and enhanced them with great, glimmering stained glass windows that threw rainbow light down into deep, dim interiors and inspired awe among medieval worshipers.The massive Gothic cathedrals in Europe, such as 'Chartres' in France, which has been in existence for the last 800 years, is a classic example. In the middle east, architects delighted in coloured glass and mosaic work. The Mosques of the Arab world shimmer with sensuous, sparkling light, expressing the poetry and the passion of Islamic culture.

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 'Louis 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.