Today was an exciting day! Nancy, our stained glass expert, brought over a sample of the stained glass sego lily to go in each of our arch top windows. While we are still playing around with the blue color, we think the piece is beautiful!
A little history – originally, each of the arch top windows had a leaded glass sego lily. The sego lily is an important image in LDS (Mormon) culture. When the early pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, they had a rough winter and inadequate food; they relied on the in-ground bulbs of sego lilies for food. Our goal was to preserve this important cultural reference. However, the original windows were single-pane glass and significantly deteriorated.
After determining that we couldn’t restore the existing windows, we went looking for a new window that would have the sego lily pattern built into the new glass. That effort produced no vendor that could meet the requirement. We had to settle for getting the outside shape of that leaded glass area – which Loewen did admirably. We are really pleased with the new windows.
Our solution was to craft a stained glass window that was exactly that size and place it inside of the window grid. We talked Nancy, a renowned glass artisan, into making room in her busy schedule. She took tracings of the leading to work from. We also decided to add a little color.
After some fine-tuning, we set the prototype in place and stood back to admire it, from both inside and outside (left window, still some protective film on the outside glass).
We’d love to hear your comments on our new glass. Also, tell us what you think about the blue color – should we lighten it to more of a sky blue?