We were asked to restore damage to one of the windows which depicts Robert Burns, one of the literary giants celebrated in a sequence of windows in the main entrance and first floor landing. We removed the window, created a rubbing to record each piece of glass and lead, soaked the window to remove dirt and loosen the old cement/putty, and dismantled the window to the point where we could access the damaged area.

We sourced a great colour match in a mouth blown French glass; strangely it’s often easier to match colours in older windows than newer ones that use a lot of textured machine made glass. The colour and patterns of the machine made glass tend to get changed fairly frequently, whereas the “recipes” for the mouth blown colours tend to go back a very long time. The next stage was creating a new piece to match as closely as possible each brushstroke of the original artist; to recreate it took multiple firings, seven in fact, to gradually build up the tonal values. When it was all completed, Rabbie looked like new again!