I have been working with computers my entire life and that is a very long time. I got my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Arizona State University back in the 1990s. But then moved to a teeny tiny town in the mountains of Idaho where using my degrees was almost impossible. So, I learned how to drive school buses to pay the bills while putting together my web design business which was in it’s infancy but also in high demand.

I recently immersed myself in the stained-glass world once again. There have been a lot of changes in the last 30 years! One of which was creating stained glass patterns with vinyl and a Cricut machine. The improvement was incredible! No more cutting out paper patterns, tracing them onto the glass with a sharpie hoping against hope that the lines would stay on through the grinding process. But the vinyl held its shape and stayed on beautifully through the whole process. I was inspired.

Then I got a message from a wonderful man named Bob asking if I had looked into creating stencils for stained glass. It took a while to convince me to dive into that realm, but I did, and I really liked the result! Sometimes it’s hard to visualize the perfect piece of glass to use and the stencils solved that problem beautifully. They were also reusable and could be sold or given away to someone else when people were done with their project which is pretty cool!

So, I gave up my weekends, fired up Photoshop and Illustrator, and set out to create the perfect digital pattern that could be used for both vinyl cutouts and stencils. It was a challenge. But after numerous hours of trial, error, research, testing, wasting material, more research and more testing; I believe I have mastered the craft. The trick is in vectorization and getting the lines as small as possible for the copper foil technique but large enough to weed out the excess vinyl and still create a strong enough base for the stencil to keep its shape.