“After this, I’ll only make them for my grandchildren.” Arlene Petrak (68) is letting the final 412 hummingbird lamps go at a special price. The Toledo glass restorer is done selling.
The ruby-throats leave Toledo in the first week of October. Not gradually — they’re simply gone one morning, and the feeder outside Arlene Petrak’s kitchen window hangs there with nothing to do until late April.
She took that feeder down for twenty-eight years without thinking much about it. Then one October she didn’t want to look at the empty hook anymore, so she made something to put in the window instead.
That was nine years ago. She’s been making them ever since. This year is the last year you’ll be able to buy one.
Thirty Years in Glass
Petrak came up in glass — church windows, mostly. Toledo, Sandusky, half the parishes in between. Lead came, soldering iron, and a great many January mornings on scaffolding in a building nobody had bothered to heat since Christmas.
She is not modest about the work.
When a hundred-year-old window comes apart in your hands and you put it back so the congregation doesn’t notice anything changed except that the blue is blue again — that’s a real thing to be able to do.
She’s also done doing it, and she’s clear that nobody made the decision for her.
I didn’t stop because I had to. I stopped because I was fifty-nine years old and standing on a plank, and I thought: I don’t want to spend my sixties up here.
Why It Isn’t Glass
Petrak would rather say this part first than have anyone say it for her: the lamp is not glass. It’s resin, cast in a mold she cut herself, and the color is painted on by hand.
The reason is the part worth listening to.
A church window doesn’t move. It sits in a stone opening, the wall holds it, and if nobody touches it, lead and solder stay where they were put for a hundred years. That’s the bargain glass makes — keep it still and it will outlast you.
A lamp is the opposite of still. It gets picked up, dusted, carried into another room when the furniture changes, nudged by a cat, caught by a sleeve. And before any of that, it goes in a box and gets handed to a stranger who throws it onto a truck in Toledo and takes it off another one in Phoenix.
I know exactly what happens to leaded glass that moves, because that was my job. The windows that came to my bench broken were almost never the ones sitting in a wall. They were the ones somebody had taken out of the wall. Solder joints work loose, the came flexes, a panel starts to rattle, and from there it’s a matter of time.
I wasn’t going to spend thirty years learning that and then mail people something built to fail.
So she built it the way it actually wants to be built. The hibiscus at the base is shaped the way she’d have shaped it in glass. The dark lines between the color panels sit where the came would have gone. The light comes through from the inside the way it comes through a window — as a diffusion, not a beam.
She uses transparent pigment, which means every piece pools a little differently where the color runs deepest. Hold two side by side and you’ll see it.
That’s not a flaw I’m apologizing for. It’s the only reason I bother painting them myself.
What It Does
Switched off, in daylight, it reads as a sculpture: dark bronze base and branch, jade green over the crown, magenta at the throat, soft yellow through the breast, and wings that run blue and green into magenta before going gold at the feather edges. People walk past it, and then they come back.
Switched on after dark, it stops being an object. The color deepens, the hibiscus begins to glow from inside, and the wall behind fills with scattered warm light that shifts as you move. The corner it stands in becomes the part of the room you want to sit in.
That’s the same trick a cathedral window plays. I just made one small enough for a nightstand.
At 9.85 inches tall it fits a nightstand, a windowsill, or the table beside a reading chair without crowding anything. It runs on three AA batteries, which was deliberate: no cord means no outlet, and no outlet means it can go on the windowsill where the feeder hangs in summer — which is where Petrak keeps hers.
- Height: 9.85 in (25 cm)
- Material: cast resin, hand-painted with transparent pigment; bronze-finish base
- Power: 3 × AA batteries — no cord, no outlet needed
What Sets Petrak’s Lamp Apart
- Painted one at a time. Not printed, not decal-applied, not sprayed. Transparent pigment laid panel by panel with a fine brush.
- Transparent pigment, not opaque paint. The light travels through the colour instead of stopping at the surface, which is why a lit panel reads as depth rather than flat colour.
- No two the same. The pigment pools a little deeper along the edge of each panel, and never in quite the same way twice.
- Resin, and she says so first. It isn’t glass, and that is a decision rather than a shortcut — thirty years of restoration taught her what happens to leaded glass that travels.
- Lines where the came would go. The dark divisions between the panels sit exactly where lead came sits in a real window. That is the whole reason it reads as stained glass.
- A base with weight in it. It sits down on a sill instead of tipping when a sleeve catches it.
- Nothing to plug in. Three AA batteries, no cord, no outlet — so it can stand on the sill where the feeder hangs in summer.
- Packed for the truck. Air cushions on every side, in a box sized well over the piece.
- One honest note before you order. This is a decorative light, not a reading lamp. It will not light a page. It fills a corner with colour, and that is all it sets out to do.
412 pieces in the final run — when they’re gone, Petrak stops selling.
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What Owners Say
★★★★★
My husband has a chair by the front window and a lamp he’s had since the nineties that puts out light like an interrogation room. I put this on the table next to it in September. He hasn’t turned the old one on since. He won’t say he likes it, but he won’t turn it on.
— Margaret H.
★★★★★
I bought it for my mother, who already owns an alarming number of hummingbird objects. I assumed this would be number forty. It’s on her nightstand and the others are still on the shelf, so apparently not. The weight surprised me — it feels like something, not like the hollow plastic I expected for the money.
— Dennis W.
★★★★★
I keep mine on the windowsill over the sink, which is where my feeder hangs in summer. From the right spot at the counter, in the evening, it reads almost like the real thing is back. That was the whole point for me and it worked.
— Jo-Ann T.
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At A Glance
- 30 years restoring stained glass in Toledo, Sandusky and the parishes in between.
- 9 years casting and painting this hummingbird, since the October she stopped looking at an empty feeder hook.
- 28 Octobers of taking that feeder down before she made something to put in the window instead.
- 2 molds left, and she isn’t cutting another at sixty-eight.
- 412 pieces in the final run. After that, grandchildren and the church bazaar only.
- 9.85 inches tall, on three AA batteries, with no cord anywhere.
Why This Is the Last One
She’s sixty-eight. Her hands are fine, her eyes are fine, and she’d like to keep both that way.
So this is the final run she’s selling: 412 pieces, cast from the two molds she has left and painted before the end of the season.
She isn’t stopping altogether. She’ll still make them for grandchildren, and she’ll still put a table out at the church bazaar in December, because she’s done that for twenty years and would miss it. But not in production, not in runs, and not online.
When these 412 are gone, that’s the end of the part where you can buy one.
The Window Isn’t Dark
Every October the hook outside her window goes empty, and every October she switches this on instead. Nine years now.
The birds come back in April. In the meantime, the window isn’t dark.
If It Isn’t What You Expected
Send it back within 30 days and you get your money back. No explanation required, and nothing to argue about on the phone.
The Final Run
412 pieces, cast from two molds, painted by a woman who spent thirty years learning what light does when it passes through color. After that she keeps making them — just not for sale.
Was $79.95 · Free U.S. shipping · 30-day money-back guarantee