Tiny Stained Glass Replicas- Featuring Wright and Sullivan

Follow

          

 

 

 
This is a very easy and fun way to make tiny stained glass windows. They would be good for a dollhouse or a model of a church or for jewelry or window hangings.
You need to start out with some stained glass windows to trace. What I did was visit Google Images and find some pictures to copy and print out. First I looked for "church stained glass" and found a panel that I liked. Then, since I am from Chicago, I thought of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan. Both men are most famous for their architecture but they also designed gorgeous windows for many of their buildings. There are a multitude of Frank Lloyd Wright images available online. You can also purchase or locate a Dover book that features his stained glass patterns. For Sullivan I found a round window from his Auditorium Theater to complete my trio of pictures.
I printed the images out (remembering that they would shrink about 40%) and used a black Sharpie to outline them onto plain Shrinky Dink paper. You color on the rough side of the paper so that the ink adheres. I then used colored pencil to fill in the spaces. I cut out each image. You may decide to reverse the images before printing them out so they will be facing the right direction when viewed at the end, assuming you view them through the clear side of the Shrinky Dink.

 

After tracing them I punched holes using a hole punch in the Sullivan and Wright ones. The religious one I left plain as I think I want to build a frame for it and mount it in my daughter's dollhouse. I followed the directions and preheated my toaster oven to 350' with a foil-covered tray inside while it was heating up. I then lay my little windows on the foil and watched them shrink. You are supposed to cook them with the colored side up. In a minute or two they are ready to be removed from the oven. You can tell because they will have curled up and then relaxed. The second you get them out of the oven, transfer them to a flat surface and use a rubber spatula or cutting board or anything to flatten them.You have only a few seconds to do this before it hardens. If it does not dry flat you can always soften it again in the oven and try again. I know many people have been making really cool Shrinky Dink projects for years, but I am not one of those people. We never had the blank sheets before and so we just colored in lame shapes from the kits and made little, ugly jewelry. I really enjoyed this project and look forward to many more.

Gumball Dome Tiffany Lamp

If you've ever thought you might want to construct a ship out of toothpicks or engage in some other seriously tiny work this is a good starter project for you. It involves very tiny pieces and is a little tough but it is a lot smaller than a toothpick vessel and does not take very long to complete. You take a gumball dome and turn it into a stained-glass lampshade. There seem to be two sizes of gumball domes floating around out there. I got one that is tiny (1 inch diameter) and that seems to be just right for a dollhouse lamp. I would not recommend using one of the jumbo ones that hold giant gumballs as that would be way too big for your tiny house.

I cut tissue paper into very small pieces and glued it to the shade, leaving tiny spaces between pieces. I used regular tacky glue for this. I put the glue on a small section of lampshade and covered it with tissue scraps (a wet finger works well for picking them up.) After each small section I would take a break and do something else before continuing so that section could dry.

 When the shade was covered with tissue and dry, I filled in the spaces with a thick black Sharpie (permanent pen). For the base I glued a nail through a small button and then glued the whole thing onto a washer. There are lots of other bases you could make. You could use other found hardware items,or rig something up with pipe cleaner and bottle cap or whatever you can find laying around the house that looks elegant enough to sport a Tifffany lampshade. I used modeling clay to wedge the shade onto the nail head, dug out one of the adorable staff members from my childhood dollhouse for a formal touch, and the lamp is complete!