vinyl patchwork / October 15, 2022 by Sasha Ward

The long term plan for blocking the view through the bay window and into the sitting room (below) is to make a stained glass window. The short term plan was to use scraps of printed adhesive vinyl, otherwise know as window film, to make a patchwork in the window so we could get rid of the hated lace curtain. The before and after photos show the transformation of the room (mostly by painting it) and the surprising way that the coloured vinyl works. It blocks the view more but lets light through, with none of the droopiness you got from the lace curtain.

Levenshulme window - inside and outside.

The easy part was the design, kept simple with repeated, accurately cut shapes that could be moved around later. The hard part was the installation, some of the vinyl was too old or bent to stick properly and some of it looked too pale against the opaque colours (which have a white backing that you can see on the photo of the window from the outside) and had to be discarded.

Hexagons are always good, they make the design feel open and slightly curvy, but the three ‘flowers’ we planned, each with a red centre, don’t stand out because of the different properties of the different types of vinyl - it’s like mixing cotton and silk and thinking you wouldn’t notice. This vinyl project is a useful step towards designing the future stained glass window which will be a collaborative effort (this is my daughter’s house). I’ll be advocating that some red stays in.

The red vinyl stands out because it’s the only sample that I didn’t design. The other pieces we used are samples from four projects shown below. One at Millbank House where the aim was to block a building right outside the windows with peepholes remaining, two at the entrance to the same building to cover an over bright lightbox, three next to a maternity bed at Dorchester Hospital where privacy was vital, and four from was a design I always really liked installed as part of an exhibition about public art at Swindon library.

Origins of the vinyl leftovers - temporary commissions for The House of Lords Library at Millbank House (2011), The entrance to Millbank House (2012), Dorchester Hospital Maternity Suite (2019) and Swindon Library (2017).

New Front Door Window / October 26, 2021 by Sasha Ward

I’ve just installed a design for an actual window, the first in quite a while. It felt good to be working out a design for the constraints of a shape, long and thin, and the clients’ preferences, simple, blue and with a touch of the organic. Once I got back into the stride of architectural glass design as opposed to making exhibition pieces, all went well. You can see the final design as it progressed in the drawings on my studio wall below.

Full size designs, 1320 x 150 mm, drawn in this order (from left to right) 5, 4, 1, 2, 3

Samples, enamel and sandblasting on glass.

The glass samples (above) I made at the end of this stage show the basic idea, a pattern of triangles with two stems of plants growing in the gaps between them. The detail comes from the intersection of the stems and the triangle points, you get thin lines of clear glass in the outlines of the leaves while the white triangles are sandblasted and therefore opaque.

The window is in a front door and is double glazed. We realised that you could get a more interesting effect by using both panes of glass with parts of the design on each pane, something I’ve done before, so that the two layers shift against each other as you move around, as in the two layered samples I made next (below).

Front door with design in vinyl - left: first layer inside, centre: second layer outside, right: both layers from the inside.

However, our plans had to change with the news that we couldn’t change the double glazed unit in the front door without getting a whole new front door (because of warranty not technical issues). We decided it was fine to go with the design printed on vinyl, that is adhesive window film, instead. As you can see above, the new window looks completely different from the outside and the inside, with a different part of the design printed on the interior and the exterior film. Although the colour printed on the vinyl is not as transparent as the blue and green enamels would have been the window does the job of providing privacy in the hallway while letting you know who is at the front door.