I found an article about an Atlanta stained-glass artist who does a lot of architectural work, reprinted on the artist's site from This Old House magazine. Interesting piece, and a couple of really great photos, especially the one of a shield-shaped window in the very early stages of assembly (that photo makes a lot more sense to me since last night's lesson in leading). But perhaps most compelling is the story of how the artist's apprentice nearly died doing her job:

There is nothing sharper than broken or cut glass; literally a molecule wide, the edge can pass through flesh like a sword through smoke. On December 6, 1996, Vloeberghs’s apprentice, Rebecca Owens, then 22, dropped a 30-by-7-inch freshly cut pane across her upturned left wrist. The glass severed an artery, two tendons and a nerve and chipped the bone. Vloeberghs threw Owens into her station wagon and roared to Piedmont Hospital in 10 minutes as the young woman's lap filled with blood. A person Owens's size-5 feet 10 inches and 118 pounds-normally has about 5 quarts of blood. Doctors estimated that, by the time she reached the hospital, she had lost nearly 3.

With that in mind, I will forego any serious bitching about the 1/8-inch cut I gave myself last night (while breaking glass, somehow, not sure how that works) on the outside of the middle joint on the index finger of my left hand. I will, however, make the purely anecdotal observation that left hands seem, in general, to be far more imperilled by this glass thing than right hands are.

Posted by Michelle on October 16, 2002 10:36 AM