New Hampshire Day 2

Day 2 was long but fantastic!

We started off with a very wet and gorgeous walk with Mona.

This has been my breakfast for the last 2 days...it's awesome!

 Chunky, chocolate, hazelnut granola and...

 yummy nut and seed bread with cider jelly.

I need to go buy some hazelnuts for both of these recipes when I get home :)!

Angie told me before I came that she had been going over to a friend's house weekly to learn how to do stained glass.  She wants to fill her windows with stars...what a happy thought!

Anyway, she asked if that would be something I would be interested in and of course I said yes.

 It's hard to see the pretty colors because it is such a beautifully dreary day out :)

 This is her sweet friend with her two cute daughters and also another friend from their branch (church group).  This other friend recently moved from Utah to New Hampshire as well.

The process starts with a pattern that you design.

I wanted to make mine look like a quilt block.

 Then you score and break the glass and grind the pieces down to fit your pattern exactly.

This was by far the most time consuming part.

While I did that the other girls went outside and collected acorns for me.

I wanted to take some home since we just don't have that many oak trees around our area.

Ta-Da!

Everything fits pretty nicely.  

So the next step is to tape all the sides of each piece.

I had helpers with this part...actually Diane was helping me through most of the process but we recruited for this part when we realized how long my project was taking.

They said they could finish it for me another day and send it to me but Diane really wanted to try and get it done so I could take home a finished product.

 Next came the soldering.  I've never soldered in my life so that was kind of fun :)

For some reason, the solder that I started with was not very good and ended up pretty lumpy and hard to manipulate.  So we found some good solder and tried to smooth out the problems of the first.

It's all connected!

After washing it off I noticed a small crack in one of the pink squares :(

So we did what Diane did with one of her first projects when it cracked.

We covered it up with an embellishment :)

We created some little curly cues and added some beads and used one more piece of wire to create an "A".

Then we used steel wool to clean everything up a bit and then put on the patina.

Ang and Diane's favorite patina color is black so that's what we did.

Then we waxed it and wrapped it up to take home and dry overnight.

 We spent 11 1/2 hours at this dear woman's home and she didn't make us feel unwelcome at all.

She and her family were so sweet to put up with us for so long.

And there is my finished product.

I'm really pleased with it and really hope I can make it home without breaking it :)!