Why did I leave consulting to make stained glass windows?

I didn't grow up wanting to be a stained glass artist. I didn't train at an art school or apprentice under a master glazier. I spent the better part of my twenties in management consulting, working in an environment where the output is slides and the impact is abstracted enough that it's hard to point to something and say: I made that.

The stained glass came later, and more deliberately than most people assume.

Living in High Park, Noticing the Windows

I was living in High Park in Toronto one of the city's older, more architecturally rich neighbourhoods and the leaded glass in the homes there genuinely stopped me. Victorian houses with original stained glass in the sidelights. Transoms with heritage glass that had been there for a hundred years. Front doors with geometric patterns in amber and clear that shifted colour depending on the time of day. It was everywhere, once I started looking.

Something about the scale of it the way it was built directly into these homes, functional and decorative at the same time captured my attention in a way that prints on walls never had. It felt like craft in the most elemental sense. Glass, lead, and a person who knew what they were doing.

Why I Was Looking for Something New

I was working in management consulting at the time and, like a lot of people in that world, I was looking for something outside of work that gave me something more tangible. I was also paying attention to where things were going economically. AI is moving fast, and a lot of white-collar work that felt stable a decade ago the admin, the analysis, the content production is increasingly at risk.

Leaded glass felt like the opposite of that. It's inherently local. Every window is made for a specific opening in a specific home, for a specific person who lives there. There's no version of that you can automate. The value is human, physical, and place-based and I had a strong feeling that this kind of work was going to matter more, not less, as the broader economy shifted.

Teaching Myself the Craft

I started by watching YouTube. Specifically, I looked for people making leaded glass windows for homes not hobbyists making small decorative panels, but craftspeople working through an entire commission from first cut to installation. I studied the materials, the technique, the difference between good and poor soldering, what the lead lines should look like, how the cement mix should feel when it's curing.

Then I bought materials and practiced for several months. I made mistakes, remade things, got a feel for how glass behaves when you score it, how the lead wants to lay, where the structural risks live in a design before you've cut a single piece. By the time I felt ready to work on actual homes, I had enough of a foundation to test the practice at a real scale.

The First Commissions

I started by showing up at a local vendor market in Toronto with some of my work and a simple message: there's someone in this neighbourhood who makes custom leaded glass windows for homes. I was hoping someone would trust me enough to bring a project to life. That happened about a year ago.

The first commission led to another. Then another. Word spread the way it does in Toronto's older neighbourhoods someone sees the window in their neighbour's front door, asks where it came from, and reaches out. The portfolio grew. The work got larger and more complex. The understanding of structure, design, and what works in a heritage home deepened with every project.

What the Work Gives Me

What I couldn't find in consulting, no matter how interesting the project, was directness. I'm making something with my hands, for a person who lives in this city, for a specific space in their home. They can see it, touch it, watch the light move through it every morning. It's not a deliverable. It's not a slide. It's a physical object in the world that I built.

Every part of the process gives me something. The home visit, the design, sourcing the glass, building the panel, installing it and seeing it in place for the first time. It's all genuinely satisfying in its own way. I was looking for work that felt like mine for a long time. I found it here, and I don't see myself looking anywhere else.