This project was built and designed by Chris from A Glimpse Inside.
After his mother-in-law lost her husband, Chris wanted to make something meaningful for her rather than just another shop project. He decided to create a three-dimensional stained glass art piece using acrylic and resin instead of actual glass, featuring her favorite flower and favorite color as a way to honor the memory of her late husband.
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Designing the Stained Glass Look
Chris started by designing a rose motif complete with a stem and leaves, aiming for the classic look of traditional stained glass. He drew inspiration from the actual stained glass windows found in his historic home, using their color palette as a guide for the piece.
The design was cut from a sheet of black acrylic, which would act as the outline separating each colored section, much like the lead lines in real stained glass. A sheet of white acrylic served as the base layer for the piece to sit on.
Building the Resin Layers
To bond the black acrylic pattern to the white acrylic base, Chris poured a layer of high-performance resin between the two pieces, using it essentially as an adhesive. Once that layer cured, he removed the paper backing so the surface would be clean and ready for the next steps.
With the black acrylic pattern in place, Chris began filling in each section using colored resin. He used a mix of dispersion pigments and metallic mica powders, choosing an emerald green for the stem and leaves to create visual contrast against the more solid, opaque tones used elsewhere.
Filling in the tiny sections required patience, using mini squeeze bottles and toothpicks to work the resin into every corner without overfilling. Chris pointed out that it is far easier to add a little extra resin later than to fix a section that overflows, a good reminder for anyone attempting a similar technique.
He also chose to resin the areas meant to stay white, rather than leaving the acrylic bare, to keep the surface consistent once lit from behind. That decision turned out to matter later, since it helped the LED lighting shine through evenly across the entire piece.
Building the Shadow Box
Once the resin artwork was complete, Chris moved to the laser to cut a plywood shadow box designed to hold the piece like a frame. The box was built as a shallow enclosure with a slot for the resin panel to slide into.
Looking back, Chris noted he would have made the box a bit deeper to give the LED lighting more room to diffuse evenly. It is a small adjustment that could make a noticeable difference in how the light spreads across the piece.
Adding the Lighting
For illumination, Chris used a basic LED strip from a hardware store, applying it around the interior of the shadow box using its built-in adhesive backing. He also added an acrylic spacer to allow light to escape from the sides of the box, creating an extra glow effect around the edges.
After testing the setup, the light spilling from the sides gave the piece an appealing extra dimension, reinforcing the stained glass illusion. From there, final assembly involved pre-drilling and countersinking before securing everything together with a few screws, taking extra care not to overtighten into the acrylic.
A Meaningful Finished Piece
The finished result combined resin artistry, laser-cut woodworking, and simple LED lighting into a heartfelt tribute piece. What began as an experimental technique turned into something with real emotional weight, giving Chris’s mother-in-law a lasting reminder of her husband displayed through her favorite flower and color.
This project shows how woodworking and craft techniques can extend beyond furniture and functional builds into deeply personal keepsakes. It’s a great example of how combining unconventional materials, like resin and acrylic, with basic shop tools can produce a genuinely touching result.
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Matt’s Take
These are my personal thoughts and tips based on my own experience in the shop. This section is not written, reviewed, or endorsed by the original creator of this project.
This one’s a nice reminder that “woodworking” doesn’t always mean furniture and joinery. Working with resin and acrylic like this opens up a lot of creative possibilities, and the shop skills carry over more than you’d think, especially when it comes to layout, patience, and clean assembly.
If you’re considering trying a resin project like this, ventilation and gloves are non-negotiable. Even “low odor” resins can put off fumes you don’t want to breathe in for hours, and uncured resin on skin is no joke either. A cheap respirator rated for organic vapors is worth the investment if you plan on doing more than one pour.
The tip about underfilling sections is solid general advice for any resin work, not just this project. Resin self-levels and shrinks slightly as it cures, so a light pass now and a top-off later almost always beats trying to sand or scrape out an overflow. Toothpicks and small squeeze bottles are genuinely some of the best tools for detail work like this, right up there with syringes if you want even more control in tiny spaces.
On the lighting side, giving LEDs more depth to diffuse is a good general rule for any backlit project. Diffusion film or even a layer of frosted acrylic between the LEDs and the art can help smooth out hot spots if depth alone isn’t enough. Small tweaks like that can really elevate a piece like this from good to gallery-quality.