The Framers Forum

Hello Forum. I have a piece of stain glass to frame and the customer would like to light it from the back. The problem is she would a battery operated LED strip. The picture will be moved around, so plug in lighting is not an option. Any thoughts?

Hi Andybox, welcome to the forum.

I've no hands-on experience with this type of lighting, but something like this should probably work

The problem with any kind of strip light will be hot and cool spots (light wise). You need to aim for the same amount of light all over the piece. I'm currently doing a stained glass lit framing job. My solution (with help from my local sign maker) is a sandwich as follows:

The stained glass
Diffused acrylic
10mm gap with a "snake" of 5m of LEDs on its side ( so the light is bounced around)
Mirrored di bond
The back

The LEDs I'm using are mains powered ( well 12v via a transformer)

Hope this helps

how big is the piece

if its not large, you can buy led lightboxes some of them will run on batteries

another option is if its small is a digital picture frame, with just a white image

Stcstc wrote :

"another option is if its small is a digital picture frame, with just a white image"

Good idea, or if you had different colour images, it would look quite good aswell


If the customer took a photo of the stain glass, she could then just have that in the digital photo frame

I've used these before and had good results

http://www.lights4fun.co.uk/i/q/LL-14-W ... iry-lights

Forgot to say I have a sample of these lights, if you want to pop in and a look to see if they are any good.

Here's my effort