Have I ever told you guys that my mom totally rocks?  And that she’s super talented?  And that she moonlights as a glass fairy?

Well, you don’t have to take my word for it – just take a look at how she transformed the simple hutch in our breakfast room from this:

into this stunner of a showpiece:

See?  I told you she was amazing!  She put away her glass tools about 25 years ago and decided to bust them out of hibernation to spiff up our hutch – and we knew the end result would be gorgeous, since her handiwork is all over my parents’ house, from the windows in the front of the house to the china cabinet to an awesome glass coffee table.

But back to our little hutch.  The first step in taking our glass panels from plain glass to snazzy leaded glass was to tape our pattern onto the panels like this:

That way we could make sure that we liked the pattern and that everything would line up just so.  Then Mom whisked away the plain glass panels to her workshop (i.e., my sister’s old bedroom) and worked her leaded glass magic, which included things like cutting glass, stretching lead, and soldering everything together.

Pretty soon Mom had created 8 custom panels that looked like this:

Love those diamond shaped bevels!!  If you look closely, you can see numbers and arrows drawn onto each of the individual pieces of glass – since there were four different sizes of panels for the hutch, Mom used this system to make sure that none of the pieces got switched around (which would have made the panels totally wonky):

After Mom dry-fitted each one of the panels, she dabbed a little clear silicone into each of the corners and the middle of the panels and then tapped them into place:

To keep the panels from getting frisky while the silicone was drying, she used tiny nails to hold them in place along with some serious clamps (that you can see in the picture above).

So what do you guys think of the transformation?  Isn’t my mom the coolest??  And in addition to being cool, she’s also totally generous – now she’s working on a few pieces for my craft room!  Am I a lucky duck, or what??