Window (Finally) in Progress

The above is a compound window in a bedroom on the front, south side of my house. If you're able to look closely it can be seen on the outside, on the right-hand side of my house at the top of the sidebar here, directly over the little boy's head.

It had long been my intention to create second panes of stained glass for some of the windows in my house, and a few years ago I finally did get around to start doing that, after getting over a phobia that lasted 25 years about cutting the glass. And so far I've done five or six of my windows. But now I've finally started on the real monster, this compound set of 9 panes in the bedroom, which you see here, with a sheet strung across the middle row, against the sunlight that really blasts in at certain times of the morning.

Taken together the nine sections of this window measure over 6 feet high and more than 7 feet in width. That is enormous when you're talking about stained glass -- and a dude that the decades have finally exposed fully to all the afflictions that the flesh is heir to.

My plan is to make the 9 panes all parts of one composite design, of tall, bearded irises, my favorite plant, even though those highly voracious, subterranean little demons, the voles, have put me out of the business of raising them in the ground. Plus I hope to make it so that each pane will be able to stand alone if need be as an independent composition.

It's going to take a LOT of thinking and effort to draw up that design, complete with reasonable-looking and -sized cut lines for all the hundreds and maybe thousands of glass pieces of many shapes, textures, and colors, and to gather the glass, and to cut, foil, and solder it all.

To do that I am first making a combination painting/pattern piece that measures 4 by 5 feet, in itself a big project. And even more work will be required in scaling up from the painting to the stained glass pattern, since the painting will be only 75 percent the size of the window. But at least I know how to do all that.

Instead the big kicker of all this is the question of how much time and energy I have left -- both of which are slowly but noticeably decreasing almost by the day -- to finish this huge project, which I think will be something else, however, when it's finished. And if things go right, I will also end up with a big, colorful new acrylic painting to boot.

Wouldn't it be a king-sized drag if midway through, for instance, after I had only had, say, five panes done, that something happened to prevent me from ever finishing the rest.

But that's always been true of everything, and I think I can manage not to worry about it too much. The greatest thrill and satisfaction of a project like this. after all, is not nearly as much in the finished result as it is in the doing of the work itself.

Come to think of it, that even sounds suspiciously like the sex act, doesn't it? Hmmm!