Design of the Month · January 2007

"Howdy"

For the past eight years I have enjoyed working with stained glass as the co-owner of StainedGlassWindows.com. My job is mostly in sales and customer service, but shortly after we bought our Glass Eye 2000 Enterprise Edition software I have started to create designs for the first time. I would hardly consider myself an artist! Luckily for our company, we employ two full-time stained glass designers and outsource our extra pattern flow to Christie Wood who is a regular pro with Glass Eye 2000 and a popular Dragonfly Software design affiliate.

The incredible capabilities of the Glass Eye 2000 Enterprise Edition have enabled our design process to go from slow to amazingly fast almost within the first couple of weeks. Now the process of designing, resizing, and outputting the pattern directly to our plotter has allowed us to expedite each window order up to 50% faster: instead of a 6-8 week lead time it's currently more like 3 weeks. Needless to say we are very satisfied with the Glass Eye 2000 and would recommend it to anyone who is thinking about getting this program as it will pay for itself over and over. It allows our customer's sometimes faint ideas and suggestions to be transformed into a full color pattern for their approval. If you have ever tried doing this task without Glass Eye 2000 with a customer who is 2500 miles away and requests multiple pattern revisions, it is not easy.

Our design of the month submission is a custom pattern made for a client in Dallas, Texas. Would you have guessed anywhere else? After the door insert was finished we insulated this window and put it in a mahogany French door. The door now graces the entryway into his game room. Our customer was so impressed and said he could not be happier with his finished product. We owe a huge amount of credit to Dragonfly Software for giving us the ability to design and build windows for people all over the country.

Everybody at StainedGlassWindows.com would like to give a big thanks to Dragonfly Software for making our job much easier. Keep up the great work!

~ Raeanon Schmid

About the artist

Raeanon enjoys living by the beach, which is the subject of many of her designs. She lives with her husband and two children in San Diego, California.

She got involved with stained glass in 1998, helping her husband sell stained glass suncatchers which were manufactured five miles from their home in nearby Mexico. After a few years of craft fairs, they ventured into the gift market and Raeanon worked the trade show circuit which targeted sales to retail stores.

A couple years later she noticed there was a large number of requests for custom stained glass commissions. Since 2002 she has focused on custom windows, which are now 95% of her company's business revenue.

You can reach Raeanon by email.

see the previous month's design