Why "Blue Blazes"?

My father used to say "What in the blue blazes?" It was a medieval euphemism for "What the hell?" Granted, the phrase did not typically carry a positive connotation. However, given that my first windows used the diamond (broken star) pattern, which looks like the blaze on a horse's forehead, and given that my mother's favorite color was blue, Blue Blazes Glass seemed like an inspired choice for these incredibly fiery windows.

Why Dalle de Verre?

In the summer of 2002, I came across a picture of a window made with dalle de verre (1-inch thick slab glass). (In Chris Peterson's excellent The Art of Stained Glass, in the section on Kuni Kajiwara [ISBN 1-56496-463-9]). I had no previous experience, or even interest, in stained glass. Something about one of the images compelled me to start researching the technique. About six months later, I made a pilgrimage to Blenko Glass in Milton, West Virginia, to learn as much as I could in a few hours of instruction. I brought some inventory back home to California and started experimenting.

Though dalle de verre translates as slab glass, many Americans think of pate de verre if you say slab glass. Pate de verre is thick pieces of glass melted into shapes, for example, a face. Dalle de verre normally has no 3D shaping. It's just very thick stained glass windows. I use the original French term in the hope of limiting confusion.

The thickness of the glass gives an incredible richness of color to the windows. They are very difficult to photograph. Our eyes can stretch from the deepest purples to the brightest yellows, but a normal camera cannot. I'm still learning how to do justice to these windows.