How To Cut A Circle In Glass Window
Traci Westcott / Postal service Message
ROCHESTER — Stephanie Podulke has been making stained glass windows for a long fourth dimension. Later starting the business organisation with her late married man, Mike, the couple moved to Rochester in 1976. E'er since, the business has remained in the building of a former grocery store on West Eye Street. For the final seven years, her 2d hubby, Jim, has worked with her in the same shop, lending his ain skills with carpentry to the craft.
Their small shop is filled with sheets of colored drinking glass, tools, and former projects spread effectually. Exterior her office, her work can be seen throughout the customs: from the Civic Center to the Rochester Public Library, to private homes and businesses all throughout Southeast Minnesota.
At she nears 80, Podulke nevertheless has a passion for the artwork to which she'southward dedicated more than than four decades.
Then how did you first all this?
Mike always wanted to do this, and then we idea, "Well where could we learn more about it than in Europe?" Then nosotros lived in Italy for two years and The netherlands for two years learning nigh information technology and then came back.
It was kind of a silly reason. We had a studio in the cities and most of our customers were doctors, so we looked effectually and decided to move to Rochester.
Why Europe?
At the time, all the stained-glass shops on the e coast – nosotros were living out there then – were unionized. Then you were a cutter, or a glazer or an installer. And that's not what we wanted to do. We wanted to exercise it all.
Traci Westcott / Mail Bulletin
So how does your procedure outset?
A customer comes in – or a church, or a eating place – and we sort of have a psychological coming together. Do they have some sort of vision? What do they desire?
And then we do a cartoon and hopefully we capture what they want. And then it's a affair of cutting every slice of drinking glass.
How exercise you cutting it?
This is what I cut with: merely a apparently old, garden variety drinking glass cutter. It has a niggling wheel at the finish of it. It'due south not fifty-fifty sharp. That makes something called a score in the glass. It makes a scratch which disturbs the molecules enough that when you bend it, it breaks along the line.
Wherever 2 pieces of lead come together, we solder it.
Then does the glass just sit in the groove of the atomic number 82 outlines? Do you glue it in?
There'due south this stuff chosen glass cement, which is an old, old recipe from the Middle Ages. And, it's kind of similar blackness peanut butter. When it dries, it's waterproof and doesn't rattle when airplanes become over.
Traci Westcott / Post Bulletin
What has been i of your largest projects?
I did this at the Civic Center (showing a moving picture of a stained glass window with an epitome of the Twin Towers). It'south 35 feet loftier.
I was so tired of hearing almost how our country was disrespected. I thought most all the people who didn't come home.
I said to people: "Bring clear glass that means something to you." This window took most four weekends with about 400 volunteers. And they got to contain into these broken towers cleaved things from their lives.
Has there ever been an odd request?
By and large, I can effigy out how to meet people's needs. But there was this one visiting doctor. He was a brain surgeon I think. His business card had a skull with the skin off and trivial tiny hairs growing off and a drill going into the skull with bone chips and veins and arteries. And he wanted me to do that in stained glass to put in his office. And I said no.
So what do y'all similar most about your art and your career?
Traci Westcott / Post Bulletin
I like that I can imagine something and and then it becomes manifest – that something that was but in my imagination is actually lead and glass.
And, I think both of us like projects. Yous put everything into it: all your thoughts. You dream about it. You're really intense on that. You make information technology. And then it'south done. As a family therapist, I was never done. This has an end.
Practice you ever plan on retiring? How long practice you want to go along making stained glass?
I want to do this until I don't have any more designs in my head. (And) as long as I can still cut drinking glass.
Asked & Answered is a weekly question-and-answer column featuring people of southeastern Minnesota. Is in that location somebody you'd like to encounter featured? Send suggestions to news@postbulletin.com .
Source: https://www.postbulletin.com/community/the-glass-cutter-rochesters-stained-glass-window-maker-shares-her-colorful-career
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