Rescuing an Old Piece of Glass

I've sold a lot of the 1100+ glass objects I've made over the course of the last ten years.  I figured it out, I've been blowing glass or working in glass in some way for a decade now.  Not sure if I'm getting any better, but I'm still positive that work is progressing.  

So I was cleaning out a tub of old glass last summer and this very early piece was there.  It didn't have the decorations, just a blown floppy bowl.  I liked it but really didn't have a use for it.  It didn't have a bottom so it just rocked back and forth if put on a table.  However it is a pretty good color - "Cranberry Pink" it is called.  So it sat there for a while as I pondered its fate.

At that time I was trying to decide if I wanted to invest in a plotter that cut stencils.  I'd then use the stencils for sandblasting.  One night while watching HGTV with my wife, I noticed people were using scrapbooking punches with fairly heavy cardstock.  That was an epiphany for me.  Would those punches work on sandblasting resist material?  I suggested a trip to the local Michael's craft store.  I had to take my wife so I wouldn't look like a complete idiot.  Usually when I go there looking for picture frames or gifts, I'm the only male in the store.  Anyway, I took a scrap piece of the resist to the store.  Luckily, the punches were not sealed in plastic so I could "try it out".  The punch worked perfectly and out popped a nice little stencil and I had a negative image of the design left in the scrap resist.  Two for the price of one!  I quickly bought four or five punches, and a circle/oval cutter.  

I punched out a few designs and now I wanted to sandblast.  What should I use?  That's when I spotted the cranberry dish sitting there looking ready for action.  I peeled off a number of designs and put them on the dish.  The outside seemed like the best place to put them.  I used tape to mask off the areas between the stencils and headed out to the pole barn to sandblast.  Five minutes later the tape was peeled away to reveal a really nice pattern.  

During my next foray into the cold shop, I lightly ground off the bottom punty crap so it'll sit nice and even on a table.  The final touch was to add the "tub and shower protectant" I posted about a while ago here.  Wow - really nice, the gel really makes it shine and seems to fill in the rough sandblasted texture and doesn't show fingerprints.


The picture sucks, but it was a five minute job to lay down a sheet of copy paper, get out the point and shoot camera, take the picture, adjust it in Photoshop, and post it here.


Wanna buy it?

Making it Clean and Nice

One of the qualities of glass is that it is nice and shiny. Somethings this isn't what you want. You want a nice uniform matte surface. To me this is best achieved by sandblasting. However when you sandblast you get a nice surface, but one that is prone to showing fingerprints and other kinds of dirt quite easily. Cleaning is hard and tends to leave a lot of lint stuck in/on the glass regardless of the type of cloth you use to wash and/or dry it with. People have been trying all sorts of surface protectants for years with varying results. Some are pretty cheap and easy to find around the house. ArmorAll, Pledge, Rain-X, and other products have been used. None of these suited my tastes, but at least protected against some of the fingerprint oils. Liquid Lustre is another specialized one but is very, very expensive so I've only seen it used by others. I wasn't impressed.

At my recent workshop at Corning one of the participants in another session brought a product that we all were impressed with. Its called " Clean Shield® GEL - Shower, Tub & Tile Protectant" and is made by the Unelko Corporation. I couldn't find it in stores locally but is available for order on their website at $6.95 per tube, which should cover quite a few pieces. The shipping and handling for two tubes was over $9.00 so I wish I could find it locally.



Here is a picture of one of the pieces I made during the glass. It has been fused, cut and ground, and then sandblasted. Note the nice surface it leaves. You squeeze out a small pea-sized amount of the gel and work it in with the reusable lint-free cloth provided with the product. I suspect it will last for quite a while and a quick wipe with a cloth removes any dust without really disturbing the surface.

Sandblasting - it's a BLAST!

One of the things that I learned in my glass travels is that there are many things that can be done to glass after it is blown. There are all sorts of surface embellishments that are done "cold" that significantly enhance the piece. One of those techniques is sandblasting. The picture here shows a fairly complex sandblast process. I did this piece at The Studio at Corning Museum of Glass during a workshop on Photographic Processes in Glass.

This is a several step process. First, an image is prepared in Photoshop or some similar program. A half-tone screen is applied in Photoshop to break the image up into little dots, much like how a newspaper is printed. The image is inverted - blacks become whites and vice versa. This is printed on transparency film with as dense black ink as your ink jet printer can produce. This "negative" is then exposed on a photographic resist and washed out. Washing out the areas that were exposed to the light.
Once dry, this resist mask is glued to the glass to be sandblasted. On this piece, this was harder than it seemed as there were subtle compound curves in the glass that I blew. The "blank" was a base glass of black with an overlay of white. The overlay was pretty thin. The sandblasting cut through the white layer and exposed the black. I really went deep into the black to give texture. Note that there is one of the fish where the resist lifted and the sandblasting took out a portion of the white fish.

Sometimes "luck" happens. Once I got back from the workshop I started pricing out a good sandblast set up for use as home. This looked like it was going to be quite expensive. I then stumbled on an auction on eBay for a complete set up including the compressor (the most expensive part) that was fairly local. The seller was about 60 miles away and we could go pick it up - way too heavy to ship. I won the auction but had to go a little higher than I wanted - aren't auctions always that way? I now have a complete set up at home and have been learning to sandblast a little better.