Thanksgiving Faux Stained Glass Panel

I've been wanting to try this project for quite a while. Ever since I tried making faux stained glass panels with inked laminating pouches, I wanted to try making more traditional stained glass panels by painting the ink in between the sections of the vinyl.

Of course, since it's a project I wanted to try for quite a while, that meant that nothing went according to plan. I tried doing this project last week, but after cutting a Thanksgiving/fall themed design out of vinyl on my old Silhouette, I tried weeding (removing the excess vinyl) and realized that most of the design didn't cut properly. So, I tried again. This time I set it to cut twice and put the vinyl on the sticky cutting mat (instead of directly off the roll). Well, about halfway through the cut, I realized what was wrong...the blade wasn't all the way down in the blade holder (facepalm). So I ended up cutting a third time after I fixed the blade, and of course, it was perfect.

So this time when I weeded the design, it was a piece of cake.

All good so far. The design came out looking more like a coloring book page than a stained glass window, but it's a festive fall design, so we'll go with it (plus, I cut it out 3 times, darn it, I'm going to make it work).

Since it was mostly connected (one unattached piece), I went with clear transfer tape (that I bought for cheap from Tuesday Morning) instead of my preferred transfer paper tape. Since it was a simple design, I thought this less sticky option would work best.

I peeled back a corner and then the whole top of the paper and stuck it down onto the design. Then I rubbed it into place, paying special attention to the edges and the one unattached piece of the design.

Then I grabbed a laminating pouch that I ran through my laminator with nothing in it--just a clear piece of plastic. An overhead projector transparency may work too, but these laminating pouches are a bit thicker (and easier to come by these days). I clumsily peeled back a corner of the vinyl design and tried to line it up on my plastic sheet and peel it back. The transfer tape was thin and wrinkled and the vinyl wrinkled and bubbled like crazy. I did my best to smooth it down (while swearing) and trimmed the excess plastic along the edges.

From a distance, it didn't look too bad. Up close it was a wrinkled mess. But, I was going to make this work, dang it. So I got out my alcohol inks.

I started with the pumpkin. I thinned the ink a bit with some rubbing alcohol and painted it on. It was really pale. So I kept layering ink on until it was covered in color. Then I tried the squash and painted with undiluted ink. It worked much better. The only time I needed the rubbing alcohol was to clean my brush or to keep the ink from drying too quickly.

I kept filling in the design by painting alcohol ink onto the sections. I actually had to come back and repaint a couple of the sections because they looked too perfect and didn't match the other sections. The vinyl worked perfectly at keeping the ink from running, and the only issue I had was with the purple ink of the grapes turning a bit iridescent/cloudy as it dried on the areas of the vinyl that I painted over. As a proof of concept, it worked perfectly, and I proved that I could totally try this again with a more stained glass-looking design and better transfer tape and with my blade properly loaded and without the dark inks that leave residue on the vinyl (that's a lot of exceptions, but you get the idea). 

I used a lighter to heat a pin and inserted it into the corners of the panel to create holes. I used some fishing line and made a string to hang it in my window. Even though it had all kinds of problems, it turned out pretty well (as long as you don't look too closely at the vinyl :-)).