Competition: design your own stained-glass window for your chance to win a £100 goody bag!
We’d like you to draw your own stained-glass window, coming up with a design based on your own life or experiences. The creator of our favourite entry will win a goody bag of treats from our online shop worth £100!
This competition has now closed.
Colourful Designs
Many medieval monasteries and churches had spectacular stained-glass windows with colourful designs telling stories from the Bible. The first stained glass in Britain was made all the way back in AD674 – more than 1,300 years ago! – when Benedict Biscop asked French craftsmen to make the windows for St Peter’s Church, Wearmouth in Tyne and Wear.
Making stained-glass windows was a complicated process. It involved working from a drawing (called a cartoon), cutting out pieces of coloured glass, decorating glass with enamel paints, and then using lead strips to hold the glass together.
You can still see stained-glass windows in lots of religious buildings today, such as Tynemouth Priory in Tyne and Wear (pictured), Brinkburn Priory in Northumberland, and the 13th-century chapel at Goodrich Castle in Herefordshire.
Telling tales
Stained-glass windows don’t always have religious meanings though, and can tell stories about different people, places and events. For example, a window in Farleigh Hungerford parish church in Somerset, dating from around 1370, shows the head of a knight. It’s thought to be the powerful Sir Thomas Hungerford, who built the first Farleigh Hungerford Castle.
If you go to Farndon Parish Church, near Beeston in Cheshire, you can see a design dating from 1662 that shows the story of the Royalist forces who defended Chester against the parliamentarians during the English Civil War.
Even more recently, a beautiful stained-glass window (pictured) was installed in the chapel in Goodrich Castle in 2000 to mark the new millennium. It was created by an artist called Nicola Hopwood, and includes the rock on which the castle stands and the River Wye. Three faces symbolise the three local communities of Goodrich, Marstow and Welsh Bicknor. This shows how important the new millennium was to people at the time.
Design your window
Now we’d like you to tell us a story with your own design for a stained-glass window, using our special template (ask an adult to download it and print it out for you).
Draw a picture about your own life and experiences – it could be a simple story about something that’s happened to you recently, a depiction of your friends or family, or a drawing of some of your favourite things such as pets, family, stories, cartoon characters, computer games or food.
Download your templateHow to enter
Once you’ve designed your window, you can enter it into our competition to be in with a chance of winning a goody bag of prizes worth £100 from our online shop! Ask an adult to scan or take a clear photograph of it and send it to us at membersmagazine@immediate.co.uk, along with your full name and age, and your parent or guardian’s membership number, name and address.
Please make sure you have your parent or guardian’s permission to enter, and check the terms and conditions below. Entries must be in by midnight on Wednesday 2 June. Good luck!
Enter now