The glazing shed at Verrine · come in, mind the sawdust
A window is only ever half glass. The other half is the hour. Push the sliders. Nothing here is precious — I have made eleven of these and I will make eleven more, and every one of them is my favourite while it is on the bench.
Do not look at the window. That is the beginner's mistake and I made it for nine years. Look at the floor. Glass is a device for putting colour on stone, the way a bell is a device for putting a shape into air, and the stone is where the work actually lands. A window admired at eye level is a window admired by somebody standing in its own light and not noticing.
Fewer lights means bigger panes, and bigger panes mean you can use the streaky glass — the kind with the wobble in it, where the colour pools thick at one edge like syrup at the bottom of a jar. More lights means finer leading and a window that reads as a single glowing coin from across the nave. Both are correct. I have never once been asked which I prefer and I would answer for forty minutes.
Set the hour to five and stay there a moment. That is the window doing almost nothing, holding one long note, waiting. Then run it up to one o'clock in a single drag and watch the floor swing across like a hand sweeping crumbs off a table. That's the whole trade. That's it. That's the thing I get to do.
The fourteenth light in the outer ring is set a half-degree proud of true. This happened in the second week of glazing, it is visible only when the ring is wide enough to hold fourteen, and it has not been corrected and will not be. My teacher left one in every window she made and never said why, and I have decided the reason is that a window with a mistake in it is a window someone made, rather than a window that simply occurred.