My current project, a 200-piece tulip window for Tulip, my friend on the Sunshine Coast, is coming along. I have 110 pieces soldered together and another cut and ground. It is taking longer than I wanted and having a worse toll on my back than I'd like. Yesterday I went to the supply store and spent $200 on more glass, a glass cutter and two grinder heads to make the job easier. I have some large complicated shapes (especially the clear background pieces along the top), some brittle glasses and add-on foil overlays that are really slowing me down, but I am pleased with it so far. The fact that it will be housed in a friend's home and be "special" to him makes it worth the extra effort.

I love doing projects for friends, or anyone really who has an idea he or she wants realized in glass. I like involving them in the project from start to finish, educating them on the process, using their input in the design and bringing them with me to help select the glass I will use. That way it means a lot more to them.

I am often asked why I never tried to do stained glass full time. I did try once, shortly after I arrived back to Vancouver from Toronto in the mid-90s. There are several reasons why it didn't work for me. I miss the socializing of talking to others at a workplace, even just on the phone. I hated the lack of separation of work and home spaces; there was always an unfinished project staring at me when I tried to relax. I started spending more money in bars and restaurants both because I was lonely and because I needed to get away from my work. It was also hard to makes ends meet. I didn't like marketing myself and when I did, I often took on stupid jobs for stupid clients who more often than not backed out of the project when some other consumer product caught their eye.

Today is a case in point of what I used to deal with on a regular basis. Jeremy, one of my students who is better at website design and marketing, gets lots of public clients knocking on his door. He sent a woman over to me that he was too busy to help. She said she had a Tiffany-styled lampshade that needed repair. The fact that she couldn't describe what was wrong with it told me that it was likely to be trouble.

I returned her call and asked her to make an evening appointment last week to let me assess the damage. She suggested a couple afternoon times before I finally got through to her that I have a regular day job that I am not going to quit for her sake. We finally agree on this afternoon (Sunday), but she couldn't exactly tell me when because she would have a toddler with her and she was trying to squeeze my appointment in between different cultural and social events. That gave me a bad feeling, but it was worse than I expected.

She arrived around 2 with a large box in her arms that contained the wounded lamp. She said she only had a few seconds as her husband was alone in the car with her toddler. I resisted the urge to ask her if her husband could not be trusted. I told her it would take more than a few seconds to do an assessment. She asked if she could just leave it with me. Not unless I will be doing something with it, I made it clear.

I opened the box while she glanced anxiously at her watch. It wasn't a Tiffany-styled lamp at all, just as I suspected. It was a simple panel lamp with 16 sides forming a cone and another 16 pieces forming a vertical skirt. It was a cheap Mexican job, made inappropriately with crap glass and soft lead came, as most of them are. Every second panel had decals glued onto it, a sort of faux-stained glass made for those who cannot tell silk flowers from real ones or copper from gold. She hadn't even bothered to take the light bulb out.

None of the pieces were broken but the entire 16-piece skirt needed to be melted off and rebuilt because the soft lead had pulled apart, as it usually does. I explained that I do not use lead came and would have to rebuild it a different way using copper foil. I tried to explain that Tiffany invented the copper foil method so it would be strong enough for lampshades, because lead came, like hers, never is. She really wasn't interested. She asked me how much. I offered her a ridiculously low price of $35. She balked at the price, saying she really had no place for the lamp anyway. She just wanted me to buy it off her hands, probably for a price far greater than what it was worth, but I made it clear I had no place for it and didn't want it. Guess I'll just have to give it to the Salvation Army, she moaned. I would have suggested my building's dumpster but being Sunday I knew it would already be overflowing. I gave her back the box and ushered her out to her car, leaving her to deal with her problem on her own.