Eldon’s Lantern

A year-long journey to honoring a legacy.

I got into stained glass about 5 years ago.  Making and restoring historic doors and windows, the interest came somewhat naturally.  Customers would ask me if I could also repair their stained glass while addressing their worn down sashes or doors.

To Eldon who taught me the stained glass, it had also come somewhat naturally.  He was my wife's grandfather.  His family had a flower business and owned greenhouses.  After hail or a storm, he would go around cutting glass to replace all the broken panes.

Sometime in his thirties, he decided he wanted to take a stained glass cutting and soldering class.  He was good at it and very much enjoyed it.  He started it as a hobby just on the side, while he grew his flowers and plants in the greenhouses.

Going through the stacks and stacks of albums of all the stained glass pieces he produced over the years, it's hard not to wonder why he didn't turn the stained glass into his primary business and keep his flowers as a hobby.

Once he passed the greenhouses onto his son, he spent 4-5 hours a day in his little shed, drawing out his designs, copying them onto thin cardboard, numbering the individual pieces, cutting them out with his three-pronged scissors, tracing them to the most complimentary veins of glass color he could find, cutting the pieces, numbering them, grinding them, heating them, foiling them, and then puzzling them together before pulling out his flux and soldering iron.

He just loved it, and he did it until the very day he died.

I think he loved it so much, he was actually afraid to ever charge for the work he did.  Perhaps if he turned it into a business, people might stop coming around to ask him to make them a piece.  And if that happened, he might not have a good enough reason to keep making the stained glass.

He gave away thousands of pieces, from small to enormous in size.  The idea that his pieces were scattered about all over the world made him glow with a smile from ear to ear.  If you were from elsewhere, you were actually much more likely to get a piece.  He'd make it as quickly as he could to make sure you could pack it with you in time.

For about a year, I went out there almost every Saturday afternoon to cut glass, and I genuinely started to love the stained glass.  There was something about being deliberate in all the choices to make: the design, the hues of color, the pattern, even the flow of the solder, but without ever worrying about the choices either.  It was both enormously satisfying and peaceful.  It just worked for me.

Eldon told me, "I like how precise you are.  You just really seem to care."  I did.  And still do.  It's actually really important to me in the way that we work at Ambacht, on everything.

Eldon passed and left me all of his glass - a couple of truck loads of it.  For a while it just sat there in the shop, but the itch lingered.  One day, while I was watching TV with my two year old, I noticed the fairly wild Victorian pattern in our old vent grill.  It came out of nowhere, but I wanted to use the pattern and turn it into a type of lamp.

The next day I brought the grill to the shop and told the guys I wanted to make a stained glass lamp.  They probably thought I was a little off my rocker.  Neither of them had ever done any foiling or soldering, but we ran with it.  I tried to show them as much as I could.  We played with about a dozen designs; we attempted one which came close, but still felt a little off.  And then randomly over lunch, talking about the feeling I wanted, I drew a quick sketch on our work bench with a pencil.  That turned into the lamp you see in the pictures.  We had almost finished it by May of 2025.  All three designs were cut and foiled.  Then came the tornado.

It sat for almost 8 months.  I got its walnut frame lapped and carved this past month, and finally soldered the sheets together last week.

I hope you like it.  I'm calling it Eldon's Lantern.

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