Richard E. Roberts
Gouldsboro, PA

Looking at the items on the Internet, I thought of an angel with the filigrees. The jewel in the center of a star. Then of course the camel brought everything together I knew what I wanted to do, now I had to get drawn up to my satisfaction, so I could begin. "The Beginning" measures 20 inches wide by 30 inches high and took 60 hours to complete. Looking at the picture, I saw that there would be a lot of small pieces of glass. We have boxes and boxes of small pieces, just begging to be used. We save them from other projects. I believe every glass manufacturer has a piece of glass in this panel Spectrum Steel Blue Waterglass was used as the night sky which served as the background for the "jeweled" star. Youghiogheny High Strike Liver and Onions and another High Strike color were used for the stable as well as some Armstrong scraps. The filigrees were not used as angel wings, as originally thought. They were cut into 6 pieces. Four were used as accents on the palm trees and two were to create a lantern in the stable. The camel was super imposed with the other camels of the wise men and painted with magic color. The most difficult part of the whole thing was working with all of the small pieces, when you have big fingers and they do not work well with small pieces. There are a total of 250 pieces of glass in the panel. I learned a lot from my wife on this panel, she taught me how to do stained glass about 7 years ago and I am still learning a lot of things. And we still get along very well. I am looking forward to the next round.