Island artist K.B. Jones has been working for several months now on repairing the stained glass window that was smashed late last June in the front of the Vashon Presbyterian Church.

It’s been a fascinating process for Jones, who’s in the artistic business of making new stained glass windows. “Going backwards,” she calls it.

“It’s just so different going backwards in the process,” she said recently in her roomy studio on 115th Ave. S.W.

Instead of putting the window together as she would to make a new one, she’s had to take the old one apart and start over again.

Although the primary damage was done to the head of Jesus in the center near the top of the window, which is actually one of three making up a triptych, secondary damage was extensive, said Jones.

The whole window, like all old-style stained glass, is built with metal leading that holds various pieces and colors of glass together to create the whole image. So when the head of Jesus was broken out, the rest of the window was torqued, causing damage to 42 pieces of glass.

Jones first laid the window on a flat table and covered it with the kind of paper that a person would use to make rubbings on gravestones. That allowed her to run a pencil along the metal framing, creating a map of the whole structure, she said.

She then labeled each section that had been damaged with a few words describing the color and image, such as a sheep’s leg or a leaf. She also had to remove the broken pieces of glass, keeping the pieces from each section separate from the others because the aim is not just to replace the pieces but to do it so that in the end, as Jones said, “People who look at it won’t feel as if it’s any different from how it was before the window was smashed.”

That aim involves a whole series of decisions, including knowing where to find the kind of glass used in the window (it happens to be easily available and has been in use for at least a hundred years, according to Jones). The color also has to be right, she said.

Ed Lebel of Lebel Glass Studio in Seattle helped on that score.

Lebel, who used to work for Seattle Stained Glass, now works on his own as a stained glass painter, which means that he doesn’t do the mechanical construction work.

He and Jones are collaborating on the project, and it’s his job to make the window’s image final, to paint in the details of the images on the glass.

“Ed needs to match the paint of each color to what’s already there in the window,” said Jones.

He also needs to match the brush strokes of the original painter, which means not just mimicking the strokes but finding the right brush as well. Fortunately, Lebel said, the brushes are still readily available.

Lebell is concerned only with the 42 broken pieces. Jones will handle the placement of the surviving pieces and the reinstallment of all the pieces in the window.

Lebell uses a paint comprised of ground glass mixed with a pigment that, after he applies to the glass, is melted in a firing oven at temperatures between 1,150 and 1,200 degrees. That bonds the paint to the glass.

Jesus’ head, which the vandal apparently took direct aim at, was in many pieces, but Lebell managed to get most of them and reassemble them using beeswax and rosin. He felt pleased to be able to do that, since it gave him a sense of the colors involved in that part of the window.

As of last week, Lebell said he still had to do test runs of the colors to see how they turned out in the heating process.

“I have to figure out the artist’s palette,” he said. “Once I get it figured out, it will come together pretty quickly.”

He hopes to be done by Thanks-giving or the end of November.

“It’s kind of a lost art,” he said. “There are so few people in the area who can do it and are willing to do it. A lot of them are fine artists who create their own work.

“As I’m working on it, I have a lot of respect for the original artist’s work. … One of the pleasures of the work is that you want to match wits the other artist, to create something as nicely done as they did.”