Bradley Lamps

Just a few months after finally tackling stained glass, wouldn't you know it! I jumped into what, as far as I can tell, is one of the most difficult of that art's projects. (Without disdaining the concept, I think stained glass is, if it's legitimate and polite to say so, more than a craft, for it is essentially a form of painting but using light and glass instead of the other materials.) After seeing pictures online and becoming awestruck, I just had to try making a Bradley lamp. (To check out Bradley lamps, click the title of this post.)

Bradley stained glass lamps are characterized by having bases and shades of matching designs, and besides having a regular bulb atop the base under the shade, inside the base is a second bulb, smaller, the candelabra type. Thus you get the unusual feature of having both parts of the lamp illuminated. Other stained glass lamps can say the same but their bases have at least two flat and easy to make sides. Bradley bases are much more difficult and better-looking, being conical and tapering from narrow at the bottom to wide two-thirds of the way up and then curving sharply inward again to the top. So you have curves to deal with all the way.

Bradley offers several designs, most of them floral. And again wouldn't you know it! Without being fully aware of what I was doing but just drawn by the design, I had to pick the most complicated of them, the peony. Their other designs have large blank areas, but the peony is composed entirely of many small pieces of many colors, and that involves weeks of exact cutting. The base alone has 324 pieces, and the pattern that they sell for the matching shade calls for another 300-plus.

When I started this project I had the sensation of embarking on a long, hazardous, exciting adventure, and that is just what it has been. I rewrote Bradley's instructions to suit myself and came up with 20 stages for making the base. Now after about three months I am down to the last three -- cleaning, applying the patina, and wiring, all easy compared to the preceding. The base is all assembled and soldered and looking okay.

I haven't started making the shade yet, but compared to the base, I expect that to be a cakewalk. I'm going to design the shade myself, but that will just involve incorporating the same flowers that are on the base, though in different colors, textures, and what-not.

You might not agree, but your lamps are an integral part of completing your house. They are every bit as important as having cool windows. That dawned on me from seeing how much time and effort Frank Lloyd Wright put into designing the stained glass lamp shades for his houses while he was designing the windows, and he cooked up a bunch of both.

At www.prairiedesigns.com check out his butterfly chandelier, for which the guy at this site reverse-engineered the pattern and is offering copies for sale. At $150 it's way too pricey for me, but in time I may be overcome by curiosity as to what it involves and whether I can make one. Naturally I have no doubt that I can. (Smile!)

One of the most intriguing parts of all this is that $31,500 is the asking price for a replica of this shade. Yep. That's not a typo. Thirty-one big ones!