Instructions for assembling a stained glass church.

I tell you my experience of assembling using this pattern, but this does not mean that you should only do so, and nothing otherwise. Each master has his technique of making a stained glass window, his own accumulated skill. I will tell you and show you my approach in assembling a 3 d glass object. You can safely experiment, and do as you like. The main thing is to have fun with what you do!

Stages of creating a church

The church model consists of two main items: the church building and its tower.

We will make them sequentially, and at the final stage, we will solder them together.

Let’s get started.

Print out your purchased pattern.

Prepare the tool and glass

Making the body of a glass church.

First of all, we make the body of the church-its foundation. The walls are the simplest details in this project

According to the pattern, we cut the glass for the church building.

Foil pieces.

At this point, we should get flat sides of the building.

  

We begin to solder the planes together to get the building box.

And how would you solder two planes together at an angle of 90?

You can see my method in the photo, if you know a better way, do it your way.

At the end of this stage of work, we get a church building. Please note, I didn’t make a bottom for this box, as I’m going to place it add a battery-powered cobweb LED garland.

Having implemented the project and used it for a while, I still decided, that the bottom should be made, but not for the entire building, but half or 2/3. This will keep the garland’s power supply from falling out every time I pick up the item.

Making the roof of a glass church.

The next stage in the construction of our church is the roof. We already had a little experience with the roof of the house, and we worked based on this experience. First, we try on the glass to understand what approximately the size of one side of the roof will be. You can make it at the same angle as the main corner of the church, or you can make it sharper.

It is very important to adjust the details of the roof at 45 degrees to each other. This method will help to make a beautiful and thin seam and maximize the fit of parts to each other. We cut out the details to the desired size, sharpen the sides at 45 degrees, and foil. We apply it again and check whether everything worked out for us. To do this, you can grab little tin parts (literally three dots), and put the roof on the base (box) of the church. If everything is in order, we solder the roof and connect it to the foundation of the church.

Making a tower roof

Now let’s get to the roof of the turret. It turns out very nice, four equilateral triangles are perfectly connected if you turn their sides at 45 degrees.

Having soldered the roof, we connect it to the base of the turret. We solder them together and that’s it! Our tower for the church is ready.

Assembling the Church of the Christmas Village

The next step is to solder all the windows to the finished body (if you chose the option with overhead windows, as we did). If you already have them ready, then skip this point and move on.

Then we solder all the seams of the church and connect them to the roof. The main box is ready!

The next step is to build the tower of our church. We also start with its basics. We cut out details for our future turret.

Please note that the sides are 2 mm longer than the center ones! This is necessary so that the tower tightly “sat” on the roof of the church.

As in the previous stages, after we have cut out all the details of the turret, we foilize them and link them together to check whether they all fit together. If everything is in order-we solder it completely.

All the details must be adjusted to each other in turn – your final result may differ slightly from our house! It all depends on the angle of the roof of the church – you adjust the angle in the tower and the tower itself to fit it, and the angle of your roof on the tower depends on this.

 

Making a hole in the roof

If you want your tower to glow, you can now take a thin glass drill bit and drill a hole in the roof of the main box of the church. So you can stretch the LED garland inside the turret.

Then we fix our turret on the church, soldering it in all places where the seams touch!

Applying a patina

Stained glass windows of the Nativity Church

We also offer you to make stained glass stickers for windows, doors, and church clocks – you can simply print them on self-adhesive paper and stick them on, or on plain paper and stick them on the glue with super-strong fixation. Or you can just make it out of colored glass.

And finally the finishing touches! We insert the LED garland inside our church, stretch it into the tower, and fix it!

Hooray, you did it!

That’s it, the most beautiful church of the Christmas village that you created with your own hands will delight you for many years to come!

You should already have two items from the Christmas Village series:

• Christmas house with Christmas trees and snowman
• Nativity Church, with stained glass windows.