Saturday, October 6, 2012

Cutting and Stacking, Day 2: Glass is Sharp!

I spent most of yesterday cutting and stacking glass again to practice the techniques I "learned" in last week's webinar.  I say "learned" because the webinar flew by at lightning speed, and I took pages and pages of notes, and now am reviewing the session videos and my notes, and cutting glass to practice on.





Those of you with sharp eyes will notice that one of these pieces is from yesterday's post,  meaning I actually completed only 3 stacks yesterday. But I also watched about an hour of session videos, and helped customers in the shop, so it's not like I was eating bonbons all day! Although, if I had HAD some bonbons ... just sayin'.

The glass stack at the bottom left isn't dichro - just plain glass. This one will be the test piece for the new digital controller I should receive next week - I want to see how the temps run in the kiln before I start sacrificing my dichroic glass.

It always amazes me how quickly you forget that glass is sharp when you are working with it - I was amazed that I made it through Thursday without a single cut (that's a first for me!) - so I wasn't really surprised when I started off yesterday by slicing a big (BIG) hunk out of the back of my right hand, right off the bat, reaching into my big rubbermaid glass container to pull out a box of dichro. The glass was so sharp I didn't even feel the cut, but when my hand came out of the container, holding the box of glass, I felt something wet running down my fingers - yep - it was a big cut.

It takes a lot longer to put these pieces together than I ever thought it would, so I think this will be it for the first technique we learned (engraving) - I really wanted to have 8 pieces in the kiln run for engraving, but I'm just not up to that much piecework!

The next technique is acid-etching. I haven't re-watched the videos yet on this technique, and the glass is handled very differently, so that's what I'm going to move on to today.

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