Went glass shopping for my dogwood window project yesterday. I planned to use some stuff out of my scrap glass box, but needed to buy quite a lot of new stuff anyway. It was a Sunday, and Weisser Glass wouldn't be open again until Tuesday, and I just couldn't wait. So off to Virginia Stained Glass I went. I hadn't been there in probably four years. I think the store got smaller. Literally. It's in the same place but I think the shop next to it in its little strip mall used to be space taken up by the glass store. Fortunately, it's still impossible to get a smile out of any of the staff there: thus reassured that I was in the right place after all, I commenced a vigorous browse.

When I did the Photoshop mockup of my design, I did my usual trick of swiping real glass samples off the various manufacturer's websites. Spectrum still has the best samples, hands down, and even provides an FTP site where you can download them all en masse. Bullseye's samples are the least useful. You have to download their catalog in PDF, and then for each color of glass it shows you tiny chips of like four shade variations, and the textures aren't shown together with the actual colors, so there's a lot of imagination necessary there, and imagination doesn't port well to Photoshop.

I ended up with colors pretty close to those I used in my Photoshop design, and interestingly enough, the colors look vastly less harmonious just laid out on a table next to one another than they do in my Photoshop document.

Spectrum 100K.	Spectrum 349.2.
Uroboros 60-77. Left over from the lotus panel.	Something I bought out of a sale bin at Weisser three years ago. Wissmach maybe?
Bullseye 1122-F. Left over from the crocus panel.	Spectrum 826.71.

See? That's not a collection of colors you'd just pick, out of context, to go together. Somehow it seems to work in my design comp though. Uh, fingers crossed.

Another design decision fraught with peril: am mixing opaque and non-opaque glasses with abandon here. I've never done that before. The greens and cream are pretty solidly opaque; the purple is a "wispy" glass that's fairly translucent; the red is a nice clear cathedral glass; and the crinkle pattern on the clear glass doesn't even provide the level of opacity you'd expect out of a shower stall door... so I'm running the gamut here.

For seven square feet of clear, two of purple, and one of green, the bill was going to be seventy-five dollars. (Now I *have* to build these windows...) But lo and behold, I had in my wallet a beat-up old Virginia Stained Glass punch card, which entitled me to $25 off after spending $250. When I got distracted from glassing three years ago, the card was punched up to $210. So check me out: three years later, I got $75 worth of glass for $50. A victory in the name of wallet packrats everywhere.