Stained Glass Mobiles – Part 2

Just about a year ago I posted about my first stained glass mobiles, and mentioned that I’d made 2 more that same week and would post about them soon.  Well, a year later, and here we go!  I’m trying to clear out my draft folder before the year ends, and get caught up with posting about all the projects I never posted about…

I gave you a sneak peak of my 2 new mobiles at the bottom of my 2018 Projects page, but never wrote about them:

      

I love them!  And I plan to make more.  I was hoping to have some made for this Christmas, but that didn’t happen.

So last December I picked colors for the mobiles, used my circle templates, glass cutter, and glass grinder to produce 6 circles – 2 large, 2 medium, & 2 small.  In the 2nd photo you can see I’ve already copper foiled the edges, so they are ready for solder:

      

I knew from my first mobiles that I needed 3 rings between each circle:  2 stationary ones and 1 in the middle.  Otherwise the pieces won’t hang straight.  I decided to use a random cat pencil to create rings, because it was the right circumference.  I wrapped my pre-tinned copper wire [copper wire tinted with a thin layer of tin, ready for solder] around the pencil:

      

Then used wire snippers to cut it off the pencil.  It looked like a spring:

Then I snipped off each ring and used pliers to flatten them out into rings:

       

I soldered the edges of each circle, then attached the rings.  For the middle pieces I needed a ring on each end, so I marked with a Sharpie where they should go, then soldered them on:

       

      

Tip:  always hold the rings with needle-nosed pliers while soldering because they heat up to 400° in mere seconds.  I use a block of wood to hold my circles upright while I solder rings onto the ends:

       

Once the rings were on, I washed my circles, then used needle nosed pliers to attach the center rings, linking the circles into mobiles:

       

The red and yellow one hangs in the bedroom & the purple-ly one hangs in the living room:

       

       

I also soldered some rings onto 2 small green circles and gave them to friends last year for Christmas: