Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Stained Glass Cherry Blossom Door

 This is a Stained glass door that I finished a little while ago.  It is one of three doors we salvaged that had been stored in an old barn.  The owner of the barn found them in there as he was getting ready to tear it down.  He doesn't know how old the doors are, but expects them to be quite old.  We refinished this door and decided that I should put in stained glass.  I looked around and decided that I liked the cherry tree in blossom idea.  So, I drew up the design in Google Sketchup and had the local print shop print them out to scale.
 The project took me several months to complete with many, many hours on the job.  The door has about 1200 pieces.  We decided that this door would be our bedroom door and the other two doors would be the entry doors of our straw bale house we are going to build.  The other two doors will have side light windows which will be included in the design and add another five panes of glass.  Because this is meant for the bedroom, all of the glass is opaque.
 These pictures really don't do the door justice.  We are storing the door in the basement where there isn't good light.  Plus, these are tall doors and the ceiling is too short to stand the door upright down there, so the  pictures are a little off, but the door really is stunning to look at.
This was my first stained glass installation.  So far everything else I have done has been for hanging up in windows or put in picture frames.  On this window I had to buy glass panels to put on either side of the stained glass and basically make a triple glazed window.

 Now that this one is finished, I need to start on the other two.  They will both be basically the same pattern expanded for the side light windows.  I have made a few design changes which will make them even better.
 Once I have the doors installed, I'll post pictures and maybe a little video so you can see how awesome they really look.