What Is Stained Glass? The Ancient Art Behind Every Handcrafted Suncatcher

Every handcrafted stained glass suncatcher begins the same way: with a sheet of coloured glass, a pattern, and a cutter.

What happens between that first score line and the finished piece hanging in your window is a process that has remained essentially unchanged for over a thousand years. It is one of the oldest decorative art forms still practiced by hand — and one of the few where the final result depends entirely on natural light.

This is what stained glass actually is, how it is made, and why handcrafted pieces look and behave differently from anything mass-produced.

What Is Stained Glass?

Stained glass is coloured glass that has been cut into shapes and joined together with metal — historically lead, and in the modern Tiffany method, copper foil — to form a larger composition. The colour is not painted onto the surface. It is in the glass itself, created during manufacturing by adding metallic oxide compounds to molten glass before it cools.

This is why stained glass looks different from any other coloured material. When light passes through it, the colour is not reflected — it is transmitted. The glass becomes a source of coloured light, not just a coloured object. A red cardinal in stained glass does not look red the way a painted cardinal looks red. It glows red. It throws red light into the room around it.

That is the essential quality of stained glass — and it cannot be replicated by resin, acrylic, or any other material.

How It Is Made: The Tiffany Copper Foil Method

Every piece at Sarah Customs is made using the Tiffany copper foil method — the technique developed by Louis Comfort Tiffany in the 1890s that made intricate, small-scale stained glass compositions possible for the first time.

The process, step by step:

1. Pattern and glass selection
Each design begins as a pattern. Glass is selected for each section based on colour, texture, and light transmission — cathedral glass for vivid colour, opalescent glass for soft milky diffusion, textured glass for surface interest.

2. Cutting
Each piece of glass is hand-scored with a cutter and broken along the score line. There is no machine involved in this step. The cutter follows the pattern lines, and the glass follows the cutter. It requires patience and practice — every piece of glass behaves slightly differently depending on its thickness, temperature, and texture.

3. Grinding
The cut edges are ground smooth on a wet glass grinder to achieve the precise shape the pattern requires and to create a clean surface for the foil to adhere to.

4. Copper foiling
Each individual glass piece is wrapped along its edges in adhesive copper foil tape — by hand, piece by piece. This is the defining step of the Tiffany method. The foil creates the bonding surface that will hold the solder and give the finished piece its characteristic dark metal outline.

5. Soldering
The foiled pieces are assembled in the pattern and soldered together using tin-lead solder and a soldering iron. Flux is applied to help the solder flow and bond. The solder lines are then finished with black or copper patina, which darkens and stabilises the metal and gives the piece its final look.

6. Finishing
The piece is cleaned, polished, and fitted with a hanging mechanism — a suction cup, wire loop, chain, or twine cord depending on the design. Each piece is inspected before packing.

The entire process for a single suncatcher takes several hours. For larger or more complex pieces, longer. No two pieces are ever identical — slight variations in the glass, the cutting, and the soldering ensure that every piece is genuinely unique.

What Makes Handcrafted Stained Glass Different

Mass-produced stained glass imitations — resin panels, printed acrylic, machine-cut glass assemblies — look different from handcrafted work for a specific reason: the glass.

Cathedral glass used in traditional stained glass work is manufactured in small batches. Within a single sheet, the colour varies — slightly lighter at the edges, deeper at the centre, with occasional streaks and bubbles from the manufacturing process. These variations are not defects. They are what give handcrafted stained glass its characteristic depth and luminosity.

When light moves through a hand-cut piece of cathedral glass, it reveals all of that variation. A machine-cut panel filled with uniform, commercially perfect glass simply does not do the same thing.

Why It Belongs in a Window

Stained glass was developed for windows because that is where it performs. A piece that looks beautiful under artificial light becomes something else entirely in natural light — particularly morning or afternoon sun, when the angle is low and the light is warm.

This is also why placement matters. The same suncatcher will look different at 8am and at 4pm. It will look different in January than in July. It will cast different shadows as the sun moves through the room. It is not a static object. It is, in a real sense, a light instrument — and the light is always playing it.

Explore the Collection

Every piece at Sarah Customs is handcrafted using the Tiffany copper foil method from 3mm Spectrum and Wissmach glass — the same materials used by professional stained glass studios worldwide.

• Hummingbird Stained Glass Suncatchers
• Cardinal Stained Glass Suncatchers
• Stained Glass Flower Collection
• Halloween Stained Glass Collection
• Birds & Insects Collection

Custom orders welcome. If you have a specific design, bird species, colour palette, or occasion in mind, send a message — every piece can be made to order.