Finish Laying Out Your Stained Glass Pattern

Hi, my name is Phillip McKee of McKee Stained Glass. Right now, we are going to learn how to finish laying out our pattern and prepare it for soldering. To do that, we are going to take additional Morton Layout Blocks and place them around the other edges of our piece. First, we put all of our pattern pieces that we have cut and foiled together inside. While we were doing this, as we moved across our pattern, we check each time to ensure that there was no excess growth from one piece to another. When there was, we took it back to our grinder and we ground it down a little, so that our piece did not grow outside the boundary edges of our pattern. When framing a patterns yourself, that is not incredibly important except for your desire to be perfect.

However, when using a pre-manufactured frame or a wooden frame, if your pattern grows, it may no longer fit into the frame opening. So, it is important to know how to control growth. So, first we are going to take our layout block and using our L-Square confirm that we have a 90 degree angle which we do. Once again, we put it down and hold it with our pushpins. It is now pressed tightly against the glass to hold everything in place. The last piece goes in up top, check for square and pin in place. At this point, if you have done it right, your glass should not shift around, should be firmly held in place, but not be too tight and it should be ready for soldering. You can also look at this point where you see the final layout of each piece in relation to another and see if there are any gaps.

I have intentionally included a few gaps, one here and one here, just so that I can show you what to do with this point to help cover that up. Gaps are caused by problems in grinding or cutting, you have accidentally removed too much glass. Since your solder beads will be the width based on what one edge of foil to the other is. If you have a gap, that can cause unsidely bulge in your foil. Care of this, simply take your exacto knife and trim away a little foil around the areas where there is a bulge. That way, when your piece is finished, it will look like your solder lines are the exact same width and you are cutting was perfect. You will need to do this on both sides, however you can trim the other side after you have flipped over your pattern piece. Next, we are going to move on to soldering our glass together.