Stained Glass

Our stained glass project  was pretty simple.

I printed out a punch of stained glass patterns.

The kids each chose one and I taped half a sheet of white tissue paper over the pattern.  We simplified some of the patterns - you don't want a lot of fine lines.

They traced the pattern with black glue. This is regular glue with about 25% black paint, and, while you'll never use that bottle of glue for anything else, it makes a lot of fun projects.

We'd used it on paper before, but not tissue paper, but it worked fine.  We did it on the "shiny side" of the paper, but I think it would have worked either way: it's too thick to spread much.

After it was completely dry (do not skimp on the drying time!), we colored it in with watercolors.  We used the good ones (Prang) because we wanted the color to be as intense as possible when light shines through it.


 As soon as that was dry, we cut it out and taped it to the window. Perfect!

This was Klenda's because she was the only one whose glue was dry enough to paint today!

It occurs to me that you could start with a whole sheet, cut to the size of your window to make a full window effect, but IMHO it's not worth trying as a younger kid project (it's too easy to have them smear the glue if the project is too big).