I finally decided it was time to take a crack at my first stained glass lamp shade.
For this first attempt, I chose the Worden B7-1 Baroque pattern. I picked up both the pattern and the mold from Glass House Store via their website.
Why did I pick this pattern?
A few very practical reasons.
First, it’s small. Lamp shades can get huge, complicated, and mildly terrifying. This one felt like a manageable starting point.
Second, the shapes are geometric. When you’re trying to learn how glass behaves on a curved surface, nice predictable shapes are your friends.
And third, practice makes fewer mistakes. I’ve already drawn a few whimsical lamp shade designs of my own, but before jumping straight into my own patterns, it felt smart to practice on a tried-and-true design that lots of artists have built before.
My Approach:
Traditional lamp making involves tracing a lot of little paper pattern pieces.
Which is fine… but also a little tedious.
So instead, I re-created the entire pattern in Adobe Illustrator and sent it to my Silhouette cutter, which cut the pattern pieces out of vinyl for me.
This means perfectly consistent pattern pieces and far fewer tiny paper scraps taking over my work area.
My Glass Choices:
For the main color of the lamp, I chose Wissmach Cloudy Sky Opal Streaky glass from Delphi Glass.
It’s a cloudy blend of blues with streaks of yellow. I’m really curious to see how it looks once the lamp is actually lit up. This glass will make up most of the shade, but the other colors are still up for debate.
What’s Next:
I prepped the mold with silicon heat-resistant tape to protect the styrofoam from the heat of the molten solder.
Next, I'll be cutting the first row of glass pieces and starting to fit them onto the mold. This is the part where I find out whether everything works beautifully… or whether I learn some new creative vocabulary.
Either way, I'm officially entering my lamp era, and I’m excited to see how this little Baroque shade turns out.
Stay tuned — things are about to get lit.