Holier skyline:  St. John’s now 167 feet high to top of its gilded cross

By Robert Behre

Charleston’s skyline was blessed with a new landmark Monday afternoon, as a crane hoisted a new copper-clad spire onto the top of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist.

Shortly after Bishop of Charleston Robert Guglielmone shook holy water on the 16-foot-tall cross, he recalled a recent visit to James Island…

To read the whole story, please visit: http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2010/mar/09/holier-skyline/

Our beautiful cross has undergone many a facelift on its way to the top of the spire.  Here is a walk down memory lane:

We scared the living daylights out of a lot of you with our last post when we showed pictures of our copper cross masterwork completely coated with a matte yellow primer, but hopefully we’re on our way to redeeming ourselves with this entry.  As you can see, we’ve finally started the gilding process!  We’re about a quarter of the way done at this point.

We worked late into the night to keep up with the drying times of the glue (size).  But finish our commitment, we did, and closed up shop to get a quick snack before turning in.  Coated from head to toe with gold flakes, we got some interesting looks from the clerks and patrons of a convenience store we stopped at on the way home!

We got a little carried away with the volume of pictures we posted for this entry, but they are fun and beautiful and we hope you enjoy all of them.  More pictures and posts about this gilding project are on their way!

No freaking out!  Promise?  Ok, you can look.  We know, it kind of looks like the  yellow styrofoam version of the copper cross at this point, but it’s the real thing, we promise!  Our beautiful copper cross is on its way to its heavenly golden coat.  To get there, we had to first prime the entire structure.  We tinted the primer a light buttercream color to compliment the gold leaf overlay.  The next step is to apply the size and start gilding.

Though everything looks a little crazy right now, it will all come together in gleaming perfection when we’re done.  Guaranteed.  You’ll see!

We are building a “clean room” in preparation to gild the cross.  As soon as the clean room is finished, which will probably be tomorrow, we’ll start priming.  We’ll show you this process in the next couple of posts.

For now, enjoy some more copper cross progress pictures followed by pictures of the cross suspended in a frame which will become our clean room.

We’ve been diligently refining the details on the copper cross in anticipation of starting the gilding process next week.  The tiniest imperfections must be removed before we progress to the next step so on we go with the cleaning and finishing.

We’ve got plenty of refining and cleaning and such still to do, but the copper cross will shortly be ready for its gold treatment.  We didn’t tell you?  Yup, in about a week and a half, we’ll have some pictures to show you of how we made this gorgeous cross gleam in gold.  It will be amazing!

In the meantime, we have some really fun pictures of the cross in its various stages of completion.  You can finally see how the stainless steel inner structure relates with its outer covering.

***Editor’s note:  Use the PicLens (hyperlinked in blue right above the pictures) to best view this fairly large gallery rather than skimming through the thumbnails as most of the thumbnails in this gallery have been significantly cropped.  We’d hate for you to miss the details.

Here the historic North Side cross meets the modern Charleston skyline.

The beautiful, iconic copper cross that has graced the north side of the cathedral for a sesquicentennial of years is carefully lowered from its perch by crane so it can be restored by master artisans.

Our next project was to create stylized copper crosses and “dots” in various sizes to adorn the insets of the archways on the cathedral tower.  It was a veritable Tic-Tac-Toe in our studio workshop!  (The dots won!)  We made 4 large and 8 small crosses, and 60 dots in four different sizes.

Check out our gallery below to see how these were constructed.  Pay careful attention to the soldered areas to see if you can even see a seam.  Bet you can’t!