Talking with a Woman Who Restores Stained Glass
On patience, lead came, and windows older than the buildings that house them.
She has spent thirty years putting broken windows back together, and says the actual skill is knowing which cracks to leave alone.
Her workshop is a converted barn full of glass in every stage of repair, sorted less by color than by how much of the original lead came she has been able to save.
Beginning the Journey
The instinct of a beginner, she told me, is to fix everything - replace every crack, straighten every line. The actual craft is knowing which imperfections are structural failures and which are simply history, and leaving the second kind alone.
The Interview
We talked for two hours and she never once used the word "restoration" without immediately qualifying it. She prefers "repair," she said, because restoration implies you are trying to erase what happened, and she is not.
