Despite best intentions time has yet again gotten away from us. The studio has been busy with Hunter Baillie restorations whilst keeping up the usual flow of domestic repairs and restorations, a couple of new panels and a couple of large scale domestic commissions are in design. The team continues to be busy outside of the studio as well all working hard at our studies. Sean is roughly half way through a conservation management plan project which I’m sure he’ll blog about when he has two seconds to spare. Krista and Dan continue their work at the Julian Ashton Art School. As for your humble author and GM here at RSG, my academic work is actually in the field of psychology and this year I’m heavily entrenched in independent research. So as you can see there’s quite a bit going on.

First term classes have reached their conclusion with students completing both leadlight and copperfoil projects. The design course was a rather intimate affair. A long term client who has been buying hobby supplies and getting pointers from Sean for around the last 7 years came along and learnt some of the basics that had been overlooked in his past learning which will significantly impact on his future projects. Just thought to ask him to write a few words for those of you who might be interested.

The design course was developed in response to the large number of hobbyists we meet looking for supplies from the studio with a range of design techniques that we felt could benefit from a little professional tuition. Sean remains a rather rare commodity in this country in that he is actually professionally trained and qualified. For the most part tuition is past from one hobbyist to another and many fundamental skills of the craft, including design, have been all but lost. This continues to be a major issue within industry also though that is a much larger blog post.Suffice to say that training and licensing is a major issue under debate nationally at the moment and we will give you the update when some resolutions start to emerge.

So that’s what we’ve been up to. More on the world of stained glass and RSG shortly.