The Stained Glass Window

William Fais moved here in 1985 from Mentor, Ohio. He taught 6^th grade for 25 years in Ohio.

William has a wide variety of interests from making violins, canoe building, and stained glass. He started to work in stained glass just because glass is beautiful. One of the other teachers was teaching his students how to make stained glass sun catchers. During this time a lot of people were interested in having stained glass objects in their homes. William became interested in stained glass. There was a store in Mentor that had a huge variety of glass. William fell in love with glass at that time.

He has made several windows for churches (one is in the Cazenovia Baptist Church) and lamp shades.

Many people in New Woodstock were donating their talents and skills to make the new library beautiful. William thought that the belfry window on the front of the building was quite ugly. So he decided to design a stained glass window to fill the space.

The window had 4 sections, each section has a different theme:

The first panel shows children and the wonder of reading. It features a little girl reading to the Cheshire cat.

The scientific world is represented in the second panel. Einstein’s equation, math symbols, and 2 quark symbols are all incorporated in this window.

The third window panel features the world, the Constellations Hydra, and the Red apple for Newtons Law of Gravity.

Outer space-the world beyond the earth is shown in the fourth window. The sun’s corona, Horsehead Nebula and assorted stars fill the space. (The stars were faceted zircons from an old bracelet that belonged to Mrs. Fais’s mother.)

	William and Marilyn worked together in their garage and it took all of the summer of 1996 to complete the job. Marilyn said that that was one of the happiest summers that they had spent together. They started with a hand drawn cartoon (a blue print of the design), the 500 glass pieces were cut and ground to fit and assembled. Copper foil was applied to the edges of the glass. Then the solder was melted on to the foil. The solder won’t adhere to the glass. That is why copper foil is used.
The best part of the project was choosing the pieces of glass and making sure that the palette was right. Marilyn and William spent a lot of time deciding which piece of glass would be perfect for the specific spot.

On October 26, 1996 the instillation began.

Gary Foster and William had to scale the belfry ladder. This was no easy feat. They had to remove a large beam to install the window.

The men were looking at the back side of the windows. This made the job even harder. Gary completed the job by installing back lighting.

Now the stained glass windows are illuminated for all of us to enjoy. Please take a few minutes to stop and take a look at this beautiful work of art.

You may have to crane your neck, but it will be well worth your time.