Window designs...

A year ago, my husband's sister moved into their dream house---a beautiful home they had built on a filbert farm with sweet views of the valley & Cascade mountains. For Christmas we offered to help make a fancy window to go over their front door---now a year later we're finally doing it! Of course it's not been easy because not only do we have to work with his sister & her husband on the design (not the problem), but we have to work together on this!! We're usually so compatible my sweet hubby & I, but when it comes to working on art projects together, we just don't mesh sometimes! He's great with graphics, sign stuff, lettering, but doesn't have a lot of confidence when it comes to pictorials. That means when there are any pictures involved he wants me to totally take over & do them. That would be fine, but I can't see what he's visualizing, so that's where the problems come in---after a lot of grumps & false expectations we finally came to an agreement---if he can sketch in his ideas and then pull out reference materials, I can go from there. I had drawn up a nifty design a year ago which is what we actually gave his sister & brother-in-law for Christmas, so they had that to start with. With suggestions & photos they took from their view we came up with the final design. Last night we drew this onto sandblasting stencils attached to their window which were then cut out today to expose the first part of the glass to be sandblasted tomorrow. Not an easy or quick process---especially when we don't own any sandblasting tools! Luckily Brad has sign artist connections and a buddy of his in Vancouver is going to help him out tomorrow which means I get to spend that time hanging with my sister-in-law! Yay me! Once Brad's finished sandblasting, he'll pick me up & off we go to his sister's house to install the finished window above their door---all before her party guests arrive that evening! Nothing like a deadline to get us motivated...! I'll be happy when it's up, but since sandblasting isn't my forte` & since this is tempered glass, there are still a lot of variables that could go wrong! At least my part is finished---the design is finalized & if for some reason the blasting doesn't work, I suppose we can try again with another piece of glass... Keep your fingers crossed for us---hopefully I'll be able to show a photo of the finished piece tomorrow or Tuesday!! In the meantime, here are a couple of pics showing the sheet of glass covered with the stencil material and the design sketched on---the round "lollypop orchard" you see is just the rough layout of a filbert orchard---they should look more orchard-like after they've been sandblasted---however, if you enlarge the image a bit, you might see we began to get a bit loopy last night & some of the trees have turned into little piggies....