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Article from Northern Lights in Parish Magazine, September 2007
Here at Northern Lights, we felt excited and privileged to be involved in moving a series of beautiful windows from Fellside Church to their new home at Kendal Parish Church. Originally a set of five East windows in Fellside church, we were commissioned to re-build the five windows to fit six openings in the North aisle of Kendal Parish Church.
There was also a great deal of work involved in their re-housing. The painting is superb, particularly that of the main figure of Christ in the central panel. The work is a good example of the style typical of its time. Look for the stylised symmetrical perfection and masses of architectural detail in the borders. There is lavish silver staining giving rich, golden-yellow highlights.
We photographed all 15 sections in detail for the record then. one by one, laid them on the bench and made a rubbing of each of them showing the pattern of lead lines. These would serve later as a pattern when it came to re-building them.
The windows were then dismantled, pulling the lead away from the glass carefully until we had several boxes of the component glass pieces which were soaked for days in cleaning solution to dissolve a century of dirt and grime. The glass blowing and rolling techniques of the time led to many glass pieces that were extremely thick and often distorted which makes the re-leading process at times very difficult.
Conservation decisions had to be made. There were many broken pieces of glass. Where possible we kept the original glass, repairing breaks by 'strapping' (look for the thinner lead came that joins them together. Only where the glass was badly damaged did we cut new glass and re-painted, attempting to match the paintwork of the original by using a three stage painting process. This is a restoration technique where the tracery (outline) painting is allowed to dry, t hen a layer of matting is applied and a final matting is layered on top and then fired in the kiln to f use the paintwork on to the glass. Earlier this summer, we visited the stained glass workshop in Siena, Tuscany where Sarah did her apprenticeship (and I was having some tuition under Alberto, their master painter) and found a grisaille mixture of pigment that was the perfect base t o match the reddish brown flesh tones in the window. This grisaille, that we brought back with us to England, has the slightly peculiar property of looking like melted chocolate when seen flat but appears black when held up to the light.
After the re-painting of badly damaged sections, the large panels were then reconstructed using new lead and made wider by adding a clear 2.5cm border. Because there were six spaces to be filled in the North aisle, a new window had to be designed and built from scratch and introducing the symbol of the Holy Trinity to fit between the Alpha and Omega windows in the three smaller openings. Most of this new design used leftover glass from the Alpha and Omega windows as these were made smaller to fit the openings.
A particular challenge was the rebuilding of the top sections of all the panels to fit the cinquefoil shapes of the masonry. Although they may look the same from a distance, these are all slightly different to each other and completely different to the cinquefoils of the Fellside windows. A pattern had to be made for each one and here, Sarah and I tried separate approaches; Sarah perching at the top of a ladder with a big piece of paper, a pen and a pair of scissors, pushing it into the shamrock shapes, marking, cutting repeatedly until an accurate template emerged. I tried a more high tech approach, photographing the shapes using a digital camera then using design software to trace over the image and produce a pattern. Between these two methods we got the patterns we needed and rebuilt all the top sections using a mixture of clear reedy and handmade coloured glass to expand them from the original shapes to the Parish Church shapes.
We will be working with a stonemason, John Able, to remove the old windows from the North Aisle and replace them with the new windows during the last two weeks of August.
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