By LaRayne Topp

    With intricate strokes and a finely pointed brush, she adds the first outlines of hair and eyebrows, eyes and lips to a shape of clear glass. Carefully, she places what will eventually be the face of an apostle or another Biblical character into a kiln, firing it to 1,200 degrees such that the paint melts into the glass. So begins the process of crafting stained glass.
    Nestled into an outbuilding of a farmplace is Kruse Stained Glass of Hartington, Nebraska. Surrounded by cornfields and alfalfa, and a crow’s fly from the towering steeple of Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church at nearby Bow Valley, the shop contains a craft not typically seen on such a large scale in rural America.
    Today involving two generations, Kruse Stained Glass began in 1997 by Kenneth and Kristi Kruse. On January 1, 2023, they turned the business over to their children who have grown up surrounded with the pale yellows, deep reds, vibrant blues and green grass glass, all to use in the creation and repair of stained glass windows and other glass pieces.
    Kenneth and Kristi began the business as a welcome change from milking cows. They had been dairy farming for 20 years, while yearning for weekends and holidays free from cows and milking machines, kickers and stanchions. Kenneth had been involved in a cabinet-making venture with his brother and transferred those skills to restoring windows that needed restoration in the nearby Bow Valley church. He found he enjoyed it.
    He apprenticed for six months after that while Kristi began taking china-painting classes, and then learned to paint on glass. The couple didn’t learn the craft overnight but taught themselves how to best perfect the craft. In the process, they transitioned dairy farming into raising stock cows and calves, and for a while the couple continued to farm.
    In 2000 they took a giant leap of faith, sold the cows, and delved into stained glass as a business while remaining on the farm. As their children grew, they worked alongside Kristi and Kenneth.
    “We love being creative,” Kenneth explained, adding that the Kruse kids have inherited “the disease” too.
    When Kenneth and Kristi started out, they left displays of their handicraft at local churches and also the Yankton Mall so that folks could see what they do. They sent out brochures, but eventually had to rely only on word of mouth to find work. They’ve been busy ever since. Today, the Kruses’ work can be seen across the state, as well as the Dakotas and Iowa.
    By 2015 two of their children, Jason Kruse of Hartington and Candace Burbach of Wynot began full-time employment at Kruse Stained Glass. Both trained in auto-body in college, Jason specializes in air brushing the glass while Candace completes faces and hands. The oldest sibling, Matt, does graphics for the business, designing its webpage and logo.
    It felt good to hand the business over to them, Kenneth said, although he and Kristi still help with big projects.
    The process goes like this: they travel to see projects requiring their expertise, and place a bid on the project. The Kruses can judge how long a window will last, if it can wait a year or so or if the windows need to be repaired as quickly as possible.
    If a window’s been hanging 100 years, the faults can easily be seen, and if the structure itself is weak.  Some windows display what is called a glacier effect: the panels buckle and sag after time, and require more bracing.
     “If it’s been there 100 years, it won’t fall out tomorrow,” Kenneth said. Most have sun damage as a rule.
    Once a price is agreed upon, the windows are removed and brought back to the shop where they’re soaked in cleaning solution for several weeks to remove what Kristi calls “antique” dust and dirt.
    “Some of it’s been around since the Dust Bowl,” she said with a smile.
    Typically a window needs to be taken completely apart to repair one broken piece. Colors of glass are matched with glass on hand, if possible, or repainted to as close a shade as possible. Scores of plates of colored glass are kept on hand for that purpose, along with glass for faces and hands. Black is added for shading, with color fired last. Multiple firing in the kiln is called for until the shades match perfectly. Of all the techniques, this is the hardest to learn. They also try to duplicate the previous artist’s technique.
    After the pieces are cut, they are laid in place on a paper pattern. The pieces are then held in place beside each other with the use of H-shaped channels of lead called cames. The joints of the lead strips are soldered together, the tiny spaces between the lead and the glass are filled with putty to make the window waterproof, and the excess putty is cleaned from the glass.
    Once the windows are rebuilt in the Kruse shop and the outside trim has been fashioned, the Kruses return to the job site, open up the windows space and put the window in place, all in one day.
    When the window is fully restored and back in place, and Kruse family sees the sunlight shining through, “that’s pretty rewarding,” Kenneth said.
    It might take them a year to complete a large project, with smaller ventures squeezed in-between. Because they have several projects going at once, it’s impossible to track the number of hours required to finish a piece. When Kenneth is asked, as he often is, how long it has taken to complete a certain project, his response is always the same: “A long time.”
    One of the most extensive projects the family has tackled has been hidden away in a Carmelite monastery in Alexandria, South Dakota. The members of the cloistered community originated in Buffalo, New York, and were searching for stained glass windows similar to those they remembered from there. They discovered what they were searching for in an abandoned Chicago cathedral: a series of brilliant window scenes which fitted together scanned a height of 18 feet and a width of eight. Originally crafted in Munich, Germany, the spectacular windows had miraculously survived, plastered with soot from a Chicago fire and tortured with bullet holes from gang members. The Sisters from Alexandria sent eight black and white photographs of the windows to the Kruses, asking them to consider traveling to Chicago to retrieve them.
    The Kruses had no idea of the damage they would find, but did what the Sisters asked, bringing home 16 crates of windows, 105 panels in all. The Kruses have been gradually restoring the windows all the while the Sisters from Alexandria have been raising funds for their restoration. They hope to raise enough to build a new chapel to utilize them.