When most people think of stained glass this is the type that their mind’s eye shows them. The traditional glass panels with lead (or a modern alloy) lining each piece. The shapes of the panel and pieces can vary greatly. The real reason behind the name is the way in which the piece itself is made. It doesn’t matter if the final output is a lamp or a piece of window art. The end result is still foiled glass.
The reason this is called foiled glass is that each glass shape is edged with adhesive backed copper foil before the solder is applied. You can do this by hand or with the use of this handy dandy foiling tool. I like it when things are named for what they do. In this case, a foiling machine applied foil to an edge, smoothly and evenly as you run the edge through the wheel.
The next step is to smoothly apply a solder bead to two pieces of glass to join them together. Yes, there are a lot of steps that go into making a beautiful finished stained glass piece both before and after these stages but for now, we are sticking with the basics.
Repeat steps one and two for all the pieces in your design, and voila! a brand new bit of art has entered the world. 