AMILTON D E S I G N G L A S S The artwork of Jeffrey Hamilton

As well as window to the guest bathroom, fronting the approach to the new house, Ruth and Steve Lambert also commissioned me to design a three-light door and sidelights to the entrance. Ruth wanted soemthing with high impact, providing a real 'wow' factor, nd chose Lambert's mouthblown glass to fill the sidelights.

Thanks to Greg Piper for the beaut photos: I asked him to stop by on the return journey from the Ausglass Conference in Wagga Wagga where he delivered a paper on the merits of good photography. Wamboin is located between Canberra and Bungendore: from Wagga you can drive across country through Queanbeyan. Greg has been photographing my installations for many years now; I'm extremely happy with his professional approach and his attention to detail. He's prepared to go the extra distance to produce the best results.

While this is very much an abstract work there is substantial reference to landscape, in particular the bush surrounding the house and the wider environment. The interesting angles of the architecture and the architectural finishes were also considered in the design of the glass for the door.

Thanks to a referral by Seraphina Martin, a regular teacher at Camp Creative, I took a class of beginners in leadlighting this January. We were in one of the woodwork rooms at Bellingen High School and I had 15x very keen students, most of whom had never cut a piece of glass before. The results by week's end were nothing short of amazing.

It was pretty warm most of the week and for me very exhausting: with 15x students I was on the go constantly. But I did manage to enjoy the ambience of Bellingen, heading down to swim in the waterhole at beautiful Gleniffer late in the afternoon or chilling out in the excellent cafes and restaurants. And my gracious host made me breakfast each morning which was very welcome and a great start to each day.

There is lots of interaction at Camp Creative between the various courses being run and the whole town gets behind it. The wife of one of my students was learning ukulele; my billet was studying solar printing with Seraphina; there were concerts at lunchtime and evenings and on the Friday students are encouraged to wander through all the classes to see the results on display. The whole shebang finishes with a huge concert on the last night

Rather than dash back to Sydney in one hit I drove as far as Forster/Tuncurry and stayed the night there. Enjoyed a stroll along the sea wall Sunday morning, watching fishermen, pelicans and dolphins play, followed by pancakes overlooking the lake: heaven! The cool, rainy weather was no doubt a God-send for all the firies battling blazes around the State but it put a damper on my plans for a surf along the way back home. But I did take time to explore Cape Hawk in Booti Booti National Park (under an umbrella) and enjoyed the drive through the forest to Bulladelah.

Since I was passing Newcastle anyway I decided to detour and drive along the foreshore to Merewether, a short distance inland from Bars Beach. Now that the Wamboin window is complete I'm ready to launch into "Holy Orders", third in a series of 5x small windows for the side chapel of St Augustines Anglican Church at Merewether. This was actually the first time I'd seen the two windows together, since it was dark and I was exhausted by the time I'd finished installing Baptism and Confirmation, the left hand window.

I'm pretty excited to have one of my windows on the cover of Stained Glass Quarteerly Magazine, published by the Stained Glass Association of America. The window, which I gave the Latin name Majestas Domini, is based on an image of Christ in Majesty, a woven altar frontal from an early Twelfth Century church in Barcelona.

The photos above show some of the installation process, chopping out the old diamond leadlight and installing the new glass. The chap on the far left is Mateo, a traveller from Italy. He ran his own glass art business in the Canary Islands, specialising in copperfoil, before arriving in Australia. He started working for Sallie Portnoy on a large commission and then came across to assist me in the studio for a couple of months.

As I mention in the Stained Glass Quarterly article, there was much revision of the charcoal cartoon, going back many times to my source material. In fact the whole design process took about ten months before a solution was reached which was satisfactory to both me and the Parish Priest, Fr Colin Fowler. The Hand of Christ in particular had me stumped (the original Romanesque version was found to be too open) until one night I had a breakthrough and photographed my own hand in an attitude of blessing.