The Associated Press

FOREST PARK - Fresh from telling the story of Jesus Christ in a set of church windows, a stained glass artist is turning her attention to the house where Margaret Mitchell spun her Civil War epic, "Gone With the Wind."

Patricia Vloeberghs will be recreating the decorative win-dows that where once in the Atlanta home Miss Mitchell dubbed, "The Dump." Daimler-Benz, the German automaker, is funding restoration of the house.

Three windows in the library where Miss Mitchell wrote her Civil War epic are being duplicated, as a set of bay windows and a transom over the front door. The original windows -- clear, with intricate geometric patterns -- were in the house when Miss Mitchell lived there, but no one knows what happened to them, Ms. Vloeberghs said.

The work is quite a switch from her previous assignment -- 10 deceptively simple, contem-porary stained glass windows for St. Timothy's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Forest Park.

Six of the pictures tell the story of Jesus Christ from birth to resurrection. The others rep-resent important elements of the Christian theology, such as the Bible and the Holy Spirit.

Ms. Vloeberghs said that was her first church assignment, and it took about a year.

"Ecclesiastical glass is hard to design for," the Atlanta resident said. "You really have to work with the pastor to get all the

symbols correct.  Every line means something."

The windows were a bequest from a brother and sister who attended the church before their deaths.

"They've changed the at-mosphere of worship," said the church's pastor, the Rev. Ray-mond Porter. "You look at these windows and you feel surrounded by the presence of God."

Working with her husband, Robert Cozine, and an apprentice, Rebecca Owens, Ms. Vloeberghs started the project by drawing the designs, blowing them up to make patterns, then carefully cutting the patterns on specially ordered sheets of glass.

Each window took several weeks, she said.

Ms. Vloeberghs, a Michigan native with training in several types of art, found her calling 20 years ago while painting antique-style pub signs for an Atlanta restaurant chain.

She walked into an antique store owned by an Englishman and fell in love.

"He had brought in all these incredible pieces from England, church windows and things," Ms. Vloeberghs said. "I walked into the room and said, 'That's what I've got to do.'"

Ms. Vloeberghs spent three years as an apprentice with the store owner before starting to repair stained glass.

"There's something very, very special about restoring a piece to its old glory," she said, comparing her work to plastic surgery.