"After 43 years, I'm putting the cutter down. These are the last ones I'll ever make." — Kathy (71) is selling her final stained glass witch hat lamps at a special price.

For 43 years, Kathleen Dunham restored the stained glass windows of Maine's churches — and kept every leftover piece. Now the 71-year-old is closing her workshop in Bath and turning the last of that glass into one final collection of witch hat lamps. When these are gone, there is no more glass, and nobody left to cut it.

Kathleen "Kathy" Dunham (71) in her workshop in Bath, Maine. After 43 years, she is closing her life's work.

Bath, September. The workshop sits above an old ship chandlery on Front Street, and through the tall windows you can see the Kennebec River sliding past the shipyard cranes. It smells of hot solder and cut glass. Along one wall stand wooden crates, sorted by color — ruby, cobalt, amber, bottle green. On the light table lies a half-finished hat, its brim still in loose pieces. Kathy Dunham works the way she has since 1983. But this autumn is her last.

"It's my thumbs," she says, holding one hand up to the window. "Arthritis, right at the base of both. To score glass you need firm, steady pressure on the cutter, all the way along the line. I cut the last pieces this summer, on the good days. Now I just don't have it anymore. And glass doesn't forgive a wobbly line."

Then she adds what seems to bother her even more. "People don't pay for this kind of work anymore. Walk into any store in October and it's all plastic with a stained glass pattern printed on the outside. It looks fine in the box. Put a light behind it and it's just gray. What I do is slowly disappearing."

43 years, 58 churches — and every one of them left glass behind

Every church she restored left glass behind. She kept every piece, sorted by color, for 43 years.

Kathy has counted. In 43 years she has restored the windows of 58 churches across Maine and New Brunswick. A cracked rose window in Portland. A chapel ceiling in Rockland, glass by glass. A harvest window in Belfast that had been painted over in the 1950s.

"Every job leaves offcuts," she says. "The old glass you cut out of a damaged panel, and the new glass you order in to match colors that used to be brilliant before a hundred years of soot. I never threw a single piece away. My husband used to joke that I was the only person in Maine hoarding church windows."

The crates filled up slowly, one job at a time. Each one is labeled in her handwriting with the name of the church and the year: St. Mary's, Augusta, 1994. First Parish, Brunswick, 2003. Chapel of the Sea, Rockland, 2011. "When I open one, I know exactly which window I was standing in front of," she says. "Some of those pieces went back into windows that are still up today. These are their brothers and sisters."

A few of Kathy's last designs — each one cut from the glass of a single church, and no two quite alike.

In 2006, her grandson Travis was about to have his first Halloween. Kathy took a handful of amber offcuts and built him a little witch hat lamp for his bedroom window. The neighbors saw it glowing and asked for one. Then the Bath harvest fair asked. She has made them every autumn since.

At that first fair, she brought eleven hats on a folding table. By noon, all eleven were gone and she was taking names on the back of an envelope. Over the years the designs grew with the glass: the deep cobalt left over from a chapel ceiling became a starry night hat, a batch of warm amber turned into a sun hat with a face, and the scraps from a bright harvest window became the one with bats and a grinning pumpkin. "I never sat down and drew a collection," she says. "The glass told me what it wanted to be."

What makes Kathy's witch hat lamps so different

It isn't just the shape, with its crooked tip and wide brim. It's the glass itself, and the way it is put together — the copper-foil method Kathy used for four decades to rebuild church windows that had to last another hundred years.

Switched on at dusk, the glass comes alive — you can see the colors from right across a dark room.

The copper-foil build: Every piece of glass is cut by hand, its edges ground smooth, wrapped in a thin ribbon of copper foil and soldered to its neighbors with a seam barely wider than a pencil line. The brim alone takes dozens of pieces, each set at its own angle — that is what gives it the curve. Inside sits a low-voltage USB light that stays cool to the touch, so it can glow all evening without stressing the solder. That is why a lamp like this still sits tight after years on a windowsill, while cheap decorations crack and fade after a season or two.

"Some of my customers have lit theirs every October for almost twenty years"

Letters from customers, some going back almost twenty years. Kathy has kept every one.

Kathy lifts a tin-cornered wooden box onto the workbench. It is stuffed with cards and letters. "People write back," she says. "Some every year, when they take the lamp out of the closet." She pulls one out, dated 2012: "Dear Mrs. Dunham, the hat has been in our front window for six Halloweens now. The kids on our street call our house 'the witch's house' and they mean it nicely."

The reason they last is simple: patience instead of speed. A factory stamps out thousands a day. Kathy builds one lamp at a time, and a single hat takes her most of a day — from the first score on the glass to the moment she plugs it in and the colors light up.

Under the stairs she keeps a crate she calls "the lost cause box." It is full of things people have brought her hoping she could fix them: a "stained glass" lantern with the color peeling off in strips, a pumpkin light with a crack straight through the plastic, a window hanging that turned out to be printed film on acrylic.

"I can't repair any of it," she says. "Not because it's too hard. Because there's nothing there. Hold it up to the light and nothing happens. Real glass you look through. That's the whole point."

The end of an era — and one last chance

The final collection: 236 lamps from the last of her glass. The crates are empty.

At the end of October, Kathy closes the workshop for good. "There's nobody to hand it to," she says. "Nobody wants to spend years learning a trade like this anymore. And even if they did, I couldn't teach them with these hands."

Over the last two years, in the good hours her hands still gave her, she worked through the very last of her crates. Every usable piece went into a lamp: 236 witch hat lamps. The crates are empty now. The glass from those 58 churches is gone, and she will not be cutting any new.

So that the lamps find good homes before Halloween, she has done something she never did at the fairs: set a clear special price on every single one. At the Maine craft fairs, her witch hat lamps sold for $69. For this last collection, they are $39.

"My grandson Travis handles the online part," she says, laughing. "I can restore a rose window, but don't ask me to work a website."

It was Travis — the same boy the very first hat was made for — who photographed every lamp on her light table and put the little shop together in a single weekend. "He said the first lamp was his, so the last ones should be his job too. I couldn't argue with that."

What sets Kathy's witch hat lamps apart

Her grandson Travis (20) — the boy the very first lamp was made for — photographed every lamp and built her little online shop in a single weekend.

• 100% workshop-made: Every lamp is cut, foiled, soldered and finished by Kathy herself — no molds, no production line.
• Real church restoration glass: Every design is built from the offcuts of the churches she restored. No printed film, no plastic.
• Colour that glows through: Because it is real glass, the light passes through every piece — the colors show from across a dark room.
• Cool-running USB light: Low voltage, with a simple on/off switch on the cable. Safe to leave on all evening and gentle on the solder seams.
• Sturdy weighted base: The weight sits low, so a bump on the shelf doesn't send it to the floor.
• Not just for Halloween: Most owners leave it out long after October — on a windowsill, a mantel or a bookshelf, right through the dark months.
• 10 designs: From deep midnight blue with stars to warm amber, bright autumn leaves and bats with a grinning pumpkin — each one from a different church's glass.
• Limited: 236 lamps from the last of Kathy's glass. Once they are gone, there will be no more.

What real customers say about Kathy's lamps

Photos sent in by customers from last October.

"A gift for the people you actually care about"

What makes one of Kathy's lamps such a good gift isn't only the work that went into it. It's where the glass came from. "When you give somebody one of these," Kathy says, "you're giving them a little piece of a church window somewhere in Maine. A light for the dark half of the year — and something that won't be made again."

Her customer Nicole B. (41) from Brunswick agrees: "I gave one to my sister for her birthday and told her the glass came from an old church window. She got quiet and just held it. Knowing a 71-year-old woman cut every piece of it by hand, from glass she saved for forty years — it's not a decoration anymore. I ordered a second one for myself two days later."

Where can you buy Kathy's witch hat lamps?

The lamps are available exclusively through this page. Travis runs Kathy's small shop at Backroad Goods, and it's the only place you will get an original lamp out of her Bath workshop.

Be careful elsewhere: on Amazon, Temu and similar sites, cheap look-alikes have started showing up. In a photo they look similar. In your hand they're molded plastic with a stained glass pattern printed on top. Hold one up to a light and you'll see the difference immediately.

Every order comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If the lamp isn't right for your home, one email to info@backroadgoods.com is all it takes to get your money back.