Stained Glass Salt Lake Temple

Stained glass Salt Lake Temple in the light box frame

Every year at Christmas we rotate through our siblings on who we buy presents for.  In the past I have been giving each sibling a stained glass picture of the temple where they were married.  This year we had my wife's sister Elizabeth.  At first we thought we had her brother Jonathan, for whom I made a Manti Temple picture as a wedding gift a few years ago, so I thought I was off the hook as far as making a large stained glass project for Christmas.  Come to find out just a little too late that we had Elisabeth instead. She and her husband were married years ago in the Salt Lake Temple.  So, for Christmas I made them a stained glass picture of the Salt Lake LDS Temple.  I had just finished my second version of the Salt Lake Temple which I think was my best work yet, but was a huge undertaking.  I needed to come up with a much easier design because of the time constraint.  I ended up with a still stunning straight on view from the east side with a basic  coined diamond breakup for the sky.  It ended up with about 100 more pieces than I wanted originally, but they were pretty much straight forward cuts so it wasn't that bad. Again, As I have done in th elast few pieces, I put it in a light box frame.

 

Several New Projects

I have been busy lately and have not taken the time to post much.  So, here is a post with pictures of the projects that I have been working on.  Notice that I have been building light box frames for most of my art lately.

Salt Lake Temple with flowers

Bountiful Temple

Stained Glass Nativity

Manti Temple made to go into a door.

Same Manti temple with light coming through

Stand for the Nativity that comes apart for storage.

Salt Lake Temple



It all starts with bottle glass that I have already melted flat.



Ever since people heard that I was going to make a stained glass Manti Temple they have been asking me to do a stained glass Salt Lake Temple.  Well, I finally got around to doing one.  My brother Danny was recently married there, so I decided that as a wedding gift I would make them one.  They were married in June, but I got a new job working for Snow College which required that we all move down to little old Ephraim.  This is something that we have been dreaming about ever since we left Snow College as students.  Sadly we had to leave our amazing garden behind, but it will give us the opportunity to build a new home on some bigger property and put in an even more amazing garden.  It also meant that there was no way that I could finish the temple in time, so it is now a Wedding/Christmas present.  With this piece, I was able to document the process a little better with more pictures.  So here are a few more pictures than usual.

 

This is the dorm room the college set me up with before my family moved down.  I turned it into a temporary glass shop.



Here I am cutting the blue glass for the sky.  You can see that using recycled bottles leaves a lot of "unusable" scrap.  I manage to use most of it in other projects.



Here you can see that I have started laying out the sky pieces ontop of the template.  They haven't been ground yet so they still have the patern paper glued on..

 



Now that they have been ground to the
 right shape the paper patern has been removed.



Finished the sky and working on the trees.  The greens are also recycled bottles.



Finished up the trees and starting the temple.  The gray glass had to be bought because there are no gray bottles.



I started putting the copper foil on before everything was cut out because I can watch movies and foil at the same time.



Here is the temple all cut out and about half foiled.  I ran out of foil and had to go to Salt Lake to get more. The tan glass was also bought for the same reason as the gray.



Starting to solder.  I think it looks a lot better with solder on it.  The solder hides a lot of the small mistakes.



 


Finnished solderingthe front side.  I have to be extreemly carefull flipping it over to solder the back side.



Soldering the back side.  The back ususlly goes much faster than the front because I don't have to be constantly checking that the pieces are straight.  Before they are soldered together the peices like to wiggle around a little.

 

Close up of the focal point Angel Moroni



Close up of the western spires.