Learn About the Types of Glass that can be Turned into Stained Glass

Video Transcript

"Okay so first let’s talk about different kinds of glass, I mean obviously you know that one thing that makes stained glass beautiful is all the colors that you can get it in. This is, here’s a nice red, and here is just kind of a, kind of a yellow, there is a couple more properties about this glass that I want to talk about. Some glasses are, have several colors mixed in with them, I don’t know if you can see this, but this has got kind of some blue and purple and transparent in it, it’s kind of a very thick, very textured glass. You know, here’s one that again you know, kind of swirly, kind of has some you know transparent green and transparent, just clear, very beautiful glasses are available. Here’s one that has some kind of smoky, whoops, some kind of smoky gray and clear, you can still sort of see through it but it has this nice smoky texture so that is one thing that makes stained glass beautiful, it is just kind of the color. But there are also as you can see different kinds of texture to the glass, you might not even be able to see this on camera but this actually has very, sort of strong ridges, kind of where these swirls are. I can actually feel these bumps almost like this is, this hot glass was swirled around and you can feel those ridges and even a piece of glass that is clear such as this one, it’s just kind of a clear glass, it can be made with all kinds of textures and this kind of has some streaky bubbles in it that kind of give it kind of a neat effect, you know. So kind of the two types of glass that you really talk about when you talk about stained glass are cathedral glass, right like a, like a church cathedral and cathedral glass is generally a transparent glass but you know they can have any types of textures to them so this is a type of cathedral clear that kind of has a streaky bubble texture to it. This, let’s see, here is kind of a cathedral, kind of a yellow amber color and I don’t know if you can see this, but this kind of has some, I’ll move it around a little bit, it kind of has almost like these very fine little wispy, kind of like spider web lines in it right, but it is a cathedral glass because it is a transparent glass. Here is another cathedral glass, one of the first ones I showed you is a red one, but this one has a very strong kind of rippled texture to it and it doesn’t only change the way that light moves through the glass, but it actually if you can see has a real texture to it. Okay so those are cathedral glasses and the second type of glass is what we call an opalescent glass and a opalescent glass is one that kind of has a milky color to it, kind of swirled milky translucent, well actually transparent mixed with opaque. So here is an example of an opalescent glass, you see it’s got some transparency to it but it also kind of has some of these milky streaks in it and, oh this one here and some of them are kind of in the middle, I mean this one is sort of kind of opalescent, kind of cathedral and it’s got some transparent, very textured but that is just some general terminology we use; cathedral glass if it is transparent, even if it has texture, opalescent glass if it is kind of milky and look sort of swirled with combined transparent and opaque colors. "