It took me a while before I figured out the right combination of parenting for the bones to work right, but by the end of re-rigging I feel a fair bit more confident in rigging basics now!
Bonus thing I learned:
Regarding glass materials, I had to first learn that just using the glass shader isn’t enough to have much of any light transmit through it! Something about lack of caustics in cycles means you have to do a bit of a hack (quite simple though).
I also discovered that if you allow the glass mesh to ‘shade smooth’, you get a very weird effect because it treats the shape like a rounded-off pebble (see the lamp on the right below)
