Introduction:

In the ten or so years that I’ve been working with stained glass, I’ve created ten lampshades.

• Two pairs of lampshades had flat sides.  The patterns were straightforward and really didn’t require anything special in the way of forms.  I won’t be mentioning these lamps again.
• Three of my lampshades were Tiffany reproductions and were created using purchased forms and patterns.  One used the Worden system and two used the Odyssey system.  I’ll be describing both systems because of the impact that they had in the decisions that I made in creating my own forms and patterns.
• Twice in the 10 years, I found lampshades that I wanted to reproduce but for which no form or pattern was readily available.  If I wanted to make those lampshades, I had no choice but to find a way to make my own forms and patterns.

I have been asked repeatedly to share my process for creating lampshade forms and patterns.  The problem that I’ve had with doing that is that it’s been a constantly evolving process.  Not everything that I tried worked.  With some missteps, I did succeed the first time but I also came away from that first experience with some process improvements that I wanted to make if I ever attempted to make another lampshade form and pattern.

Quite a few years passed before I was ready to make another lampshade form and pattern.  I tried some of those process improvements and incorporated others that occurred to me as I went along.  Again, there were missteps, again I was successful and, again, I came away with a list of things that I could do to improve the process.

When I set out to write this document, my intent was to describe and explain my first two efforts, missteps and all, and then outline the new, improved, process that I planned to use the next time.  No doubt, there will still be some of that but, midway through describing those very complicated processes, I realized that there was a much simpler, more flexible, way to create a lampshade form.

I say “more flexible” because my original processes were limited to making lampshade forms where the pattern and glass went on the inside of the form.  My new process looked as if it could just s easily yield forms where the pattern and glass went on the outside. Since I wasn’t about to endorse a process that I hadn’t tried myself, I decided to create two new lampshade forms,

• (Example 1) an “outside” lampshade form (pattern and glass go outside the inside of the form)
  
• and (Example 2) an “inside” lampshade form (pattern and glass go on the inside of the form).

I was planning to also make a ”complex” lampshade form (shape necessitates making the lamp in sections and then assembling away from the form) until I realized that, from a formmaking point of view, it was just a slightly more complicated “outside” form.  I decided to change my first example to a “complex” lampshade form.