Our Process

Our stained glass is made through a novel system of glass encapsulated within wooden frames, elimanting the use of lead and facilitating a wide scoper of viable designs and applicability. From bespoke shaped frames to lightboxes and movable pieces, we’re creating innovative designs and approaches for how stained glass can be used as a material.

How They Are Made

Designing

Every piece starts with a design, and all of our designs are original creations. These are rendered onto design software that allows a lasercutter to transfer the design onto the frame material.

The creation of our designs is a highly detailed process. Each design has to incoporate sufficient width to allow for affixing glass alongside aside other, and this being balanced with key design ideas and the absolute size of the finished piece. When using sheet material there are also considerations to effectively utilise the available space, to minimize wastage and increase the viability of a design.

Constructing Frames

The material for the frames is typically laserply, though any form of unprocessed wood can still be used. Laserply can be made with a variety of woods, which have different cutting and staining characteristics. The reason that processed woods can’t be used is because the contain adhesives and chemicals that produce toxic vapours when incinerated (mind those bonfires kids!).

The frames comprise two visiable faces, mirrored to on another. There is an additional layer of material resting on the same plane as the stained glass, to create a trim layer to create a tidy visual edge and add rigidity to the final piece. These layers are adhesed to one another, held together with lots of tiny clamps and clips.

Larger more complex designs may require additional layers or thicker material, and lightbox units will comprise ~6 additional layers to allow for space to create the LED light cavity.

Cutting Stained Glass

The colour of stained glass is imparted when the glass itself is forged and comes in a variety of textures, opacity, and, of couse, colours. Each artist has a prefered type of glass, and at Woddcraftian we prefer clear transluscent types such as Wissnach.

The cutting of glass is marked and cut by hand, using a glass cutter. Each piece of glass is then broken away from the surrounding material, typically as a series of staged cuts depending on the shape of the final piece. Pieces that have been cut may then need to be grozed or ground down to create the final finished shape.

Assembling Final Piece

Once the glass pieces have been cut they have to adhered into place within the frame, alongisde any material used for the trim layer. This layer has to set before a final face layer can be added and aligned and also affixed.

For a complete piece there are several layers, each requiring at least one stage of handling and adhesion before needing to be left before the next stage can proceed. Each layer becomes a permananent setup so continual focus on precision and detail is required.

Even our smallest art pieces will be comprise at least 8 different components, each to be made and affixed - typically it’s more like 20 parts!

Bespoke Commissions

Whilst we make our own range of stained glass pieces we also take commissions for unique pieces. These could be your unique design, recreations of existing artworks, or tweaks to the designs of our own pieces. We’ll work closely with with throughout to craft and refine the exact piece you’re looking for.

If you’re interested please get in touch to arrange an initial scoping call to assess the work you’re interested in and how we can help achieve your vision.