After more 100 years of service, a church window in Shelton is getting a new lease on life.
More than a century ago, as Trinity Lutheran Church was being constructed, European craftsmen installed a stained glass image of Jesus walking on water behind the church altar.
Now Michael Skrtic and Randy Rogowski of The Glass Source in Shelton are working to restore that image, which was obscured and made fragile from decades of deterioration.
After two months of painstakingly assembling and re-leading the early 1,000 pieces of glass that make up the window, the work is nearing completion.
The window is scheduled for re-installation during the week of Nov. 8. A dedication ceremony is planned for Nov. 21 at the church.
Restoration
The window was so old it was falling apart, Skrtic said. The remedy was to take it entirely apart and reassemble it with new lead between the hundred of pieces of custom-cut colored and hand-painted glass.
Every part of the window’s six panels had to be numbered and cataloged.
Photographs were taken and a rubbing of the window was made while it was still in place, so that Skrtic’s staff could put it together precisely as it was.
On Friday, Rogowski was working on the last of the six panels, comprising Jesus’ head and shoulders. Using nails and pushpins to hold the glass in place, he clipped and bent the pieces of lead — called “came” — that join the panes together.
All of the glass had to be cleaned, Skrtic said. The window also includes a number of hand-painted glass pieces that needed to be repainted, and others that were missing and had to be entirely re-created. That took some improvising, since the original processes and materials are lost, Skrtic said.
“Making it look old is hard,” Skrtic said. “We have to come up with new techniques to see how they did it 100 years ago.”
He found that adding fingerprints to the wet paint helped him to get the proper aged patina on one piece of glass.
Once the pieces are all prepared and leaded, each joint is soldered. Then comes, “the most dangerous part,” Skrtic said.
Each panel needs to be flipped over at a stage when the whole structure is still weak. That requires several people working carefully together, so that the window doesn’t come apart, Skrtic said.
Then a film of cement is placed of over the entire surface of the window and worked into each joint. That darkens the window and firms it up.
“Then it’s pretty solid,” Skrtic said.
The whole restoration process costs about $17,000, said Diane Rivers, the church’s treasurer. She said it took a two-and-a-half year fund drive to raise that money from the parishioners.
“It’s surprisingly inexpensive,” given how much work goes into it, Skrtic said.
It’s cheaper partly because The Glass Source is local. The shop is one of only three or four places in the state do stained glass restoration, he said. Some churches have to send their windows out of state for restoration, which can get quite expensive, he said.
The window’s one-hour dedication on Nov. 21 will include organ, choral, and hand-bell music, Rivers said.
