How to Make Fused Glass Snowflakes

hello there everybody thank you for joining me on this lovely day uh sunday christmas in july session for fuse glass snowflakes i don't know about all of you and what the weather is like where you are but it has been a scorcher this week which makes me just think of snow even though as soon as it snows all i want to think about is sun and the heat but that's the cycle that we go through isn't it anyway today i thought i would share with you one of the um one of one of my favorite projects for the holidays actually it's a really great project not only for creating quick ornaments and such for craft fairs and art shows that kind of thing but it's also a really successful class for me in the studio where i teach and i've got a little slideshow that i'll show you a little bit later after we kind of talk about some of what i'm doing here and go through everything but really all i'm going to do is show you almost exactly how i teach this class i've got about six patterns and i will link you to the patterns as well kind of show you around i've i've worked with this project for probably gosh seven to ten years i think and i had an original pattern that was super easy to make and that is the one that i just showed you and then i had a bunch of groups that continually came back to the studio to do this project again and again so it kind of forced me to get creative and come up with even more patterns so i've got a whole bunch of patterns that i'm going to show you i like to use the honeydew super glue for this because this piece right here has not been fired and see how easy that is for me to pick up i just put that together in the last half hour or so and if i had a studio full of folks which hopefully by this winter we can do again but we shall see if i have a studio full of folks i have a kilnful plus of snowflakes that i need to get in there and when i don't have to wait for glue to dry i can get these in and out of the kiln really quickly the firing schedule on these is a full fuse and when you're going all the way up you don't have to really worry about going slowly because they're just a bunch of really small pieces and again after it's fused on your way down you don't have to worry about this long annealing cycle so this is a really great project for getting a whole bunch of things in and out of the kiln and turned over and it's very profitable for the studio the biggest part of the whole project is the prep in advance and the prep i'll show you is really just cutting a bunch of strips i take my sheet glass and i cut quarter inch strips and i'll discuss the various lengths i mean really six inches is about i'll just cut a bunch of six inch by quarter inch strips and that's a really good start if you want to go longer you certainly can there's i have a whole bin full of strips over here so at the end of every year i can take all the strips and color sort them into the fuse glass bins and we can use those for various projects throughout the year or i can just pull them out again when it's time for the snowflake classes so let's begin shall we i'm going to take the snowflake here and just put it up and out of the way the first one that i'm going to start with is snowflake a so let's give this a let's actually go to this view here so you can kind of see everything that's going on so this is snowflake a snowflake a i've got lots of patterns but snowflake a is pretty much the basic snowflake and i usually use a piece of cardboard um to get everything from the tables and over to the workstation and then when i'm ready to load it in the kiln i can pick it up and put it down i always document the pieces of post-it and the person's name and i'll show you that in a while as well it's really important i have i have the morton system in front of me because i'm going to be showing you how to cut glass but it's really important when you're constructing these that you have a flat surface underneath them like a table otherwise the kind of the divots in the surface can affect how well the glue holds see there's kind of a little bounce there too it should be all right though so um anyway we're looking at this pattern right i want to show it to you here the patterns are all going to tell you exactly what what you need so when we're building here's snowflake a it tells us the pattern that we need six two inch strips and here are the two inch strips right it also tells us that we need eighteen one inch strips and you can see the one inch strips there right um the patterns have the size of the pieces on them they are probably you know they're probably pretty close um with photocopies sometimes they end up changing but yeah that's that's pretty darn close and you don't need rulers for everybody you just get the pattern out and print copies for everybody then you don't have to have rulers for everybody it makes it so much easier and um this is a great project for kids too and sometimes little kids don't understand the concept of rulers yet when i do this in classrooms i like to have rulers for everybody so we can kind of talk about that and how to use rulers but when it's just a fun quick project for the family to come in sometimes i've got three-year-olds working on this with their parents and they definitely don't know what a ruler is yet or how that works but they can choose the colors and their parents help them market and then they actually cut together as well and i'll talk a little bit about that so you can see how it's done but first of all i need to cut all my pieces of glass here right so i'm going to take um i've got some pieces that i picked out of my bin already i've got some white and i figured the white would be my i call these my legs right the white will be my legs and then for my bridges i'm going to be using some blue and some purple i've got um there there are parts of the snowflake let me tell you about the anatomy of a snowflake the anatomy of a snowflake i just told you we've got legs right and then we've got bridges and then we've got embellishments right those are the embellishments so we'll go ahead and get started so for my legs i need two inch strips and i need six of them so i'm going to take a sharpie i'm going to take my black sharpie because the marks burn off and the kiln i'm going to take my black sharpie and i'm going to go ahead and mark my two inch strip once i have that marked down i can move it to the other side of the line and i'm going to make another line right there and then since this is a six inch strip i've got two inches left so i have three legs three legs complete right i'm gonna take another one this one looks like [Music] these strips looked like i i had a little bit of difficulty so um it's okay i'm just gonna mark one there and mark one there that's gonna be excess so i don't need to worry about it and then i'm gonna take one here and mark that so that's one two three four five that is six strips so this is extra i can just put it back aside and then i'm going to show you how i cut these now when i distribute all the tools and everything to the tables i typically don't have tools for everybody i will take mosaic nippers and put them in a tub we nip in the tub and a lot of times i'll even put the sharpies in the tub but since there are more people at the table that can be actually marking than cutting most of the time then i'll just make sure that everybody has a sharpie and then they the uh the nippers with the lid go in between every pair of people or or in between two people because then they can share on either side of them right then the way that we're going to use these nippers if you all haven't used nippers before these are mosaic nippers and i know a lot of fused glass artists don't really use most like nippers maybe maybe more than than used to but these are a really great tool for cutting quick shapes and and even like just i don't know random shapes um lots of the same kind of shape but especially for nipping uh lengths of of strips of glass like this basically what you're going to do and a lot of times this is exactly how i explain it to everybody with the mosaic nippers you want to hold the tool out in front of you and you want the wheels to face your other hand so if the wheels are facing your other hand like this then you will be able to see where it is that you're marking right you can see that exactly where it is that you're going to be marking um and you're not going to cut your fingers this tool isn't sharp it's not going to cut you but it will score the glass and it could pinch you so you don't want to get your fingers in there if the wheels were facing away from your other hand then it gets really hard to see where exactly that line is but if you need to hold it closely your fingers are getting into pinch zone and the pinching doesn't feel good so wheels facing your other hand for i'd say fourth grade and up sometimes third grade fourth grade and up this is the this is the way to cut they don't have any problems with if you've got hand strength so you want to take and you want to cut but you want to make sure that you're aiming down into the tub so you don't shoot your neighbor okay so that one i showed you see how that piece went flying clear over there we don't want that okay so we're going to take after we've got this set up we're going to take and turn our whole hands make all of our hands sideways our hand and our body right we're going to go straight down into the tub and then we can squeeze and it goes in the tub just where we want it to now alternatively if you've got maybe some big ice cream containers the square ones you know the square plastic containers the round ones kind of fly around but alternatively if you've got a big enough container you can do this with your students as well and they can just nip into the side of the container like that right so sometimes they have a really hard you know some people sometimes they they as some people sometimes folks have a hard time with the whole turning everything turning your whole body they they understand that they need to turn this down but then they don't understand how to get there and maybe it's my fault because i haven't figured out the best way to explain it but if they're having a hard time doing that then they can just hold it normally and just aim for the tub and you'll have the tub turned over on its side right work just as well all right so now i've got my um i've got my my six two inch legs now i'm going to show you what i do with younger students that don't have enough hand strength to use the mosaic nippers all by themselves and this you know like i said i do this project with three-year-olds and up they definitely don't have the hand strength and sometimes you know the three and four-year-olds sometimes they are successful with cutting or sometimes they just you know they direct mom and dad or parent or adult figure of whoever sort they like to direct them it's really good for them they get to kind of tell them what to do since you know i don't remember way back to being a kid where everybody told you what to do so it's a nice experience for them because they get to be in charge for a second okay so now i need one inch strips and looking at my pattern here i need 18 one inch strips for this basic pattern so what i'm gonna do this one i'm already set with it i like to get different tubs for the different sizes even like the basic one it's pretty easy to figure that out because there's just two sizes but in some of the more advanced snowflakes there are up to four different sizes of pieces so it's really helpful to keep them all separate anyway 118 are one one of my 18 pieces right here already so i'll just continue with this blue one and notice this piece how it goes kind of sideways like that i'm not really going to worry about that too much it just needs to be close these are going in for a full fuse which means they're going to change shape if they went in for attack fuse the um and actually a couple of these have these both went in for attack fuse so you can kind of i don't know if you can really see they're still kind of squared off um but these both went in for tack views whereas this one went in for a full fuse so maybe you can kind of see from there the little bit of difference maybe maybe that's a better a better view for you right so here's the tack fuse one see how there's a little bit of texture there yet a little bit of texture now look at the full fused one right you can see how everything rounded off a little bit i'll talk about this as well but these are generally going to go in for a full fuse full fuse is going to make everything nice and round it's going to make sure that all the layers are all held together and there's no texture right they're going to be nice and flat so a full fuse what happens when we're we're working in the cone so glass likes to be a quarter of an inch thick or six millimeters thick when you fully fused it even if you haven't fully fused it it's working on getting to that nice comfy layer that it or thickness that it likes right so two layers of glass are going to remain about the same size width wise and height wise because our sheet glass is about an eighth of an inch thick so if you take one piece of glass and full fuse it an account it's going to try and shrink in until it gets to that quarter of an inch height right so that means the footprint it's going to get skinnier right if i put a second layer on there it's just going to relax into the shape that you've built because that's the perfect height right the edges are just going to round off it's not going to be square it'll be round off if you add another layer suddenly now we're higher than we need to be so the glass it's going to relax downward and grow outwards okay so if you don't follow this it's not necessarily important i always tell my students this so that they can understand some of these patterns because some of the more advanced patterns you can add extra layers and get the glass to move on you so you get little extra embellishments here and there that get really interesting so if you don't understand that you don't have to worry about it we can just start with the basics and you just follow the pattern but the short of that is glass is going to strive to be that two layers thick and anywhere it's two layers thick it's going to stay put anywhere else it's going to move in or move out when it moves in sometimes it likes to needle and i like to mitigate that a little bit with fiber paper underneath the pattern versus directly on a kiln wash kiln shelf because some of the glass then especially the opaque can kind of grab onto the shelf and parts of it gets stuck as i'm pulling it as it's pulling in to get to that size and then you have a little bit of cold working or grinding to do on some of the needle edges afterwards and we don't want that it's just easier if you can avoid all of that especially for these quick projects that are you know maybe you have a whole bunch of people coming into the studio at once right all right so i've got my marks here i've got one two three and i've got four so i need at least six for the inside and then six and six of the outside it's just gonna depend on how much i have going on here um it might be you know i might end up changing my pattern for whatever reason based on um you know you can you can do so many variations with that this there is no right or wrong like i said i have a slideshow at the end so i'll show you a bunch of the different color combos that i have all right now this piece of glass here you it's probably hard for you to see with this blue glass i can see the lines on that really easily right right there are the lines not a problem right the purple glass though it can be a little bit harder to see the mark so i'm going to mark this and then pull it up to the camera and see if you can see what i'm talking about here a lot of times i encourage people to always use black because then they don't have to clean their piece after they're done black sharpie burns off in the kiln so let me see right it's really hard to see that but if i turn it sideways and kind of catch the light on it oh see there's a couple marks there's a mark right there right then you can kind of see the marks right so i encourage people to use the black and then kind of try and catch the light and even by holding this up even just this far off the table i can see through and i can see where the black lines are so one two three four five six there i've got one two three four five six seven eight nine ten um so i'm going to do more of these i'm just going to cut more than i need because it's it's then i won't have to worry about thinking too much while i'm showing you what's going on here okay so how do i let um how do i how do i instruct the kiddos the littles to cut so when the littles are cutting we need two people they have a hard time doing this so a lot of times they'll try and do this and this doesn't give them any leverage it's actually harder to cut that way so what i tell them to do is take their mosaic nippers and put the wheels facing up put their hand over this like they're going to be rowing a boat right row in a boat right so they got that first hand there or riding a bike actually is what i say they're riding a bike and the wheels are facing up their hands on the handlebar and then we go to the rowing because they need another hand so they put their other hand on here and then they're rowing the boat right okay so they have two hands on the mosaic nippers so obviously they can't hold the other piece of glass at this moment right their job whoever's cutting at the moment is to make sure that the nippers are above the tub because that's where the glass is going to land so i show them how they squeeze open and close and that is the cutter's job their partner their partner's job is to make sure that they get the mark right in the middle where the wheels need to be and then they work together and then as soon as that person can bite down the wheel can stop this person doesn't let go they need to hold on and then this person imagine a hand there this person can squeeze with both hands and then this person has the other piece of glass right and sometimes this is easier for for adults to cut too if you feel like you need to cut with the most like nipples aiming down you certainly can there's no reason that you can't now so i'm going to turn this sideways so i can hold the longer end and a lot of times when i'm cutting like this i will take this finger right here when i use mosaic nippers and i will i will sit it on the outside of the wheel and then i can just kind of feed the glass in exactly where i need to go the other thing about these mosaic nippers the secret another secret that i'd like to share with you is sometimes it's really hard to cut glass with these guys and usually that's because you're trying to center the mosaic nipper wheels in the middle of the glass and that's great and all but if you can pull it back to the corner and then squeeze it becomes much easier to cut the glass the one thing that you're going to give up there is that the glass might cut off to the side a little bit so you might get an angle but remember what i said about this project the glass is going to move because we're full fusing it that means that we really don't have to be too persnickety about our pieces when they're not exactly cut straight that's why this is a great project for everybody kids and adults included because you don't need to worry too much about the results um a lot of people when they first start this they get really worried about this and then as they come back every year and do more they understand what's happening with the glass as it melts in the kiln and how it changes so they start to realize that oh the fact that it was cut sideways a little bit doesn't matter when i when i cut it and i try and emphasize that with folks but some people you just some people just don't learn until they actually experience it most people that's how we learn as we experience things so it's okay it's all right okay so i'm gonna take this guy this guy's ready to go in the kiln i'm just gonna move him up and out of the way over here because before i build on my pattern i need a piece of parchment paper the parchment paper is really important because as we're working with glue even though we're using baby dots of glue baby dots are just a little bit right even though we're using baby dots of glue sometimes we use a little bit more than we wanted to or the glue goes somewhere we didn't exactly expect it to go well the parchment paper is going to protect my pattern i'm a little frugal midwestern and my grandparents grew up in the great depression so i think maybe i was influenced by that a little bit but i hate throwing things away so if i can get lots of legs out of this pattern right here if it can last me a long time i i thoroughly enjoy that if i accidentally glue my glass to the paper then as i pull the glass off the paper pattern is going to be destroyed so the parchment paper helps a lot for that it's a nice release so i can put that down and if i do get a little bit of glue that goes off on the parchment paper the parchment paper usually lets go of it pretty easily so long as we're not trying to glue glass to paper we're usually fine so that's another thing i stress i i say it and then i ask everybody are we gluing glass to paper or are we gluing glass to glass for this project we're gluing glass to glass not to paper okay so glass to glass all right now remember as i was talking i told you we've got some legs and we've got some bridges and we've got embellishments we're going to start by laying down the legs and then we're going to build bridges and then we're going to lay our embellishments now why do we need to worry about bridges well when we put pieces of glass down here's a piece of glass there there there and notice i'm following my pattern right now if i were to put these pieces of glass into the kiln how many pieces do you think i'd get back that always puzzles people what do you mean well if glass isn't overlapping it's not going to stick together so i would get six pieces back right this is where those bridges come in handy so we need to build some bridges so that this piece actually sticks together and as i'm showing people this i usually don't use the glue as i'm doing it because i'm doing a whole bunch of different samples but it's completely up to you when i give demos in the class i usually kind of hurry through it a little bit it's probably it's probably a bad habit because i think if i'm hurrying through it then they're not you know the folks aren't really getting the best experience but people don't like to listen to um instructions they like to jump into the project as well so it's a little bit of a juggling act um so i'm gonna go ahead and figure out i've got two four six [Music] eight and 10 there and then i've got 2 4 6 2 4 6 8 10 11 12 of those all right that's that's uh more than enough all right so i've got all these pieces set up and we're ready to go um i need six pieces for my bridge and then i have 12 pieces as embellishments and i have a full 12 there so i could do all purple on the outside but i was thinking i would do blue and purple out here and then let's see if i did that i'd do 2 4 6 and i could do purple on the inside and then that's that's what i'll do all right two four six so these are going to be extras this is kind of why it's nice to cut a little bit of extra because then you've got a kind of a choice when you when you get to this anyway we want to build bridges first and to build bridges um and i'll show you why i don't glue this first to build bridges we're gonna place a piece of glass on nate two neighbors right so now if i put this in the kiln to fire how many pieces do i get back well here's one it's overlapping so they'll stick together right one two three four five all right excellent so now we need to continue with building bridges so i'm going to go ahead and build another bridge and then wait a minute now that one's going to be really hard to do now i'm going to backtrack just a sec here when we're building these snowflakes i always tell people we want to build them like we're playing with legos or with lincoln logs for the older generation i remember lincoln logs grandma had them all right so if you're building a bridge with legos and you have one lego here and three legos here can you take a lego and slap it down and make a bridge you can't likewise with lincoln logs if you're going to build a bridge you need a one two three lego high footing and a one two three lego high fitting or footing and then you can build across so what we really want to concentrate on is making sure that everything is even all the way around which is why if i go across the street to build that bridge i'm going to have a hard time so i'm going to go next door to the neighbors and build a bridge there and then i'll go next door over here and build a bridge so now how many pieces come out of the count one two three well that's still not enough so i'm going to build one more bridge between each of those alright so before i do that i'm going to use some glue now i've got the super glue here i have used other super glue in a pinch at the studio and the problem with that is it is super runny it is super messy i've had people accidentally glue their fingers together i've had people myself accidentally glue their finger to the super glue bottle um the little tubes those little cheap tubes sometimes it's tempting to grab those from the hardware store you can get six tubes for like a dollar i don't know how many ounces is in each tube but they make them really small because typical super glue when you grab it and you use it after you've opened it up the shelf life isn't very long next door go next door right there the nice thing about the super glue is it has an extended shelf life especially if you store it in the refrigerator between uses the other thing is it's a gel glue versus a runny glue so when i put it where i want it to go it doesn't run off and get all over my fingers all over my work surface it stays where i want it to so this this tube will last um actually i've had these last a couple of seasons a couple of snowflake seasons in the studio so i really get a lot of use out of them so now i'm going to go around and build my second layer of bridges and i don't know if you can see those dots that i'm putting on but they're you know they're kind of big baby dots i don't know it's not um it's not just a little tiny bit um especially right now because i'm using some bullseye glass and bullseye isn't flat on both sides it's got a little bit of a texture on one side so if you're using a little bit of texture on one side and you're putting texture to texture or even flat to texture you're going to need a little bit more glue to kind of help fill in those gaps so that the pieces actually stick together because if you've got texture to texture and just the tiniest amount of glue and it doesn't fill in then there's nothing really for the pieces to to hold on to right that makes sense all right so now i've got my bridges built if i put that in the kiln how many pieces do i get out exactly so it's a snowflake but it's a kind of boring snowflake so we're going to add some embellishments so that's where we come out to the outside here and we're gonna put some little uh mini legs on how's that we're gonna put some mini legs on all right so i go ahead and i like to go ahead and put in all the dots at once especially if i've got people that are a little bit older working in the studio that can handle kind of multitasking or getting things done fairly quickly actually when i use this i don't always put the lid back on but i'll let it l lay sideways while we're working in class because that way the glue is kind of already at the top but so this doesn't set up right away i've got a little bit of time and what i'm going to do here is i'm going to alternate so i'm going to alternate inside and outside on these and notice i put it in place and then i give it a push down right hold it in place and my pattern's moving a little bit it's not a big deal because i can see it if you've got students that are having a really hard time with this a lot of people like if you can take some scotch tape and tape the pattern down to the paper um because when it moves it for people that get a little persnickety and pattern driven like if you have a hard time visualizing what it is that you're working on because you know you haven't done it before then when the pieces move around like that it can be a little frustrating so if you can take a little bit of scotch tape and just maybe tape two corners down that'll help them typically i encourage them to work through it because it's helpful for growth but if they're really really frustrated i'll give in and let them do it but i generally like to challenge people even with a simple project it's a pretty simple project so i don't want to pick this up right away because it does take a little bit of time to set up but in the next you know in the next half hour for sure that's going to be all set up and dried and ready to go so i'm done with those pieces i'm going to show you another pattern that i have so when i demonstrate these patterns i've got a b c d e f are my um my basic patterns and that's the ones that you're going to find i'll just take a break and show you in my etsy shop so this is my my personal etsy shop i've been working on these designs for the last i don't know a while like i said but um these are the basic patterns and you get a little mini ebook that talks about directions and how to put these all together and then firing schedules and here you can see some of the this is like a 20 inch shelf this is my personal kiln so you can get a good amount of snowflakes in there um and then also i just worked on my additional patterns as well so then i've got i think g h x y and z i think are my additional patterns so you can get some you know other uh patterns working for you there right okay so i've got snowflake a i'm just going to go ahead and move this out of the way i could test it and see oh yeah look at that that's pretty good i can i can pick it up already right that's whee that's not bad not many glues where you can do that right out the gate all right meanwhile here's my other one that i assembled earlier so when i go ahead and load these in the kiln be able to put them right next to each other like that because remember they're not going to grow except where there's two layers so anything that's just one layers is going to shrink back so presuming that your people if if you built them all then you'll know if you built them all centered there are some patterns where if you don't build according to the layers they'll stick together but they might fall down a little bit so that's something you might want to think of i'm just going to take that and put it over on the side and then we're going to work on snowflake e now snowflake e i have already pre-cut the pieces for um looking at snowflake e um we've got 12 one inch strips and there there's a spot here that says six squares of a quarter inch that's optional and that goes down to like adding embellishments and if you want it to kind of get bigger in areas so if you put extra bits in these corners out here then this star gets a little um it's a star what i call a star snowflake it gets a little bit of a a a circle at the end where it kind of bulges out right so that's completely optional you don't need it but snowflake e is kind of the transitional snowflake between snowflake a and snowflake c right so they're they look a little bit different and they're definitely different but see how you can see there's a little star in the middle of the c well we use snowflake e to kind of bridge that gap i use it when i'm teaching people so i show them this one next so this one we just need 12 in 12 one inch strips and i've got all of those i did two colors so i want to make sure that i keep my colors separate um because i'm going to alternate colors and the cool thing is if you do this with red and white it looks like a candy cane so candy canes star snowflake things right all right so i'm going to take all my pieces and i've got them all already cut and now they're laid out so i'm going to go ahead and lay down my first layer now remember when we're building we want to build in equal layers right so we're going to build bridges so that means i i don't want to build like this right so check this out i'm just going to show you here see how those pieces are kind of already falling off to the side it's because they're not supporting themselves right i could glue them to get the glue to support them but the glue burns off in the kiln at 600 degrees and if they're not fully supported when that glue burns off those pieces are going to do exactly what they just did there and pieces that are touching each other may or may not fuse together right remember they're trying to reach that quarter inch thickness so if they somehow touch before they pull back then they might stick but most more than likely you're going to get pieces that pull apart so we're not going to do it that way what we want to do is build in one layer our first layer and we're going to go all the way around until we reach the other side again okay there that's our first layer now we can go in and build bridges but before we do that let's put some glue down so we don't have to take everything apart and put it back together i have some people that really really like to cut everything and put it all together to make sure that's how they really like it before they glue it together and i can understand that when it's your first project especially like if you've never done this before and you want your project to turn out perfectly i can completely understand that however i don't do that especially if they are doing that tell them to not spend a whole bunch of time getting everything perfect that time because it's you know actually constructing and when you're gluing that's when you want to get everything perfect if you're just kind of testing the look of it lay it out quickly and then you can pull it apart again okay so i didn't tell you but i put glue on both sides of every piece that's down that's because it's time to build bridges and we're going to connect the inside to the outside all the way around the other way right i got myself there there we go so i've used two yellows here for a star and i thought that might look nice i don't know that i've ever done a couple of yellows as a star before i usually do snowflakes and you know what they say about yellow snow right you can use any color you want in a snowflake quite honestly that one there it is done see how incredibly quick that one went it was so fast so we're going to take that concept and we're going to use it with snowflake c however with snowflake c i haven't pre-cut any of the strips or pieces i could go in and use my bucket of scrap over here got a whole bunch of strips pre-cut right so i could dig through it and find just the pieces that i want but maybe you don't want to take the slow route for building these maybe you'd like to go a little bit faster maybe you're producing a bunch of snowflakes for a craft fair that is the slow route the route that i just showed you it's great for classes when you are going to prep all the material ahead of time so what you're going to do is you're going to cut a bunch of quarter inch strips i am getting the morton board set up here because i'm now going to cut all of my pieces not just quarter inch strips because i have a plan i know exactly what i'm doing so i'm going to take my candle and just rub it on the side there it's not necessary that you do that every time with the morton system but when you're using your glass cutter against the bar you can build up friction if you don't have any sort of lubricant there so that candle wax is really nice for getting rid of any friction so the metal and the metal they won't kind of catch if you're using the morton system and you've used it for a while and all your cuts are great and then suddenly you've run into this piece of glass that keeps breaking wrong even though you're cutting the same way you've always cut it's probably the friction so if you can take and add a little bit of cutter oil or even a barbed soap or the candle across the edge of the metal then the metal and metal they're not going to build up friction and you're going to be able to cut and then you'll find out lo and behold there was nothing wrong it wasn't a bad cutter it wasn't you it wasn't the glass it was just friction okay so that happens every once in a while okay so what i want you to notice here i have put some tape along the bottom of my my um my bar i can't remember what it's called i usually go ahead and label label all the parts so i can always tell you exactly what they are like there's the cutter gauge we're going to be using next anyway here's my bar and i've got the cutter gauge and i've got my pattern hiding underneath here pattern c all right so pattern c i need to cut six strips that are two and a half inches those are my legs right i need 24 three quarter inch strips uh okay i need 12 one inch strips and then i need some quarter inch squares okay so i'm going to go ahead and mark everything off so i've got a pencil here um a pencil is usually what i use you could use a fine tip sharpie or even a pen but i want to make sure and pull my cutter gauge down because if i'm making marks and i'm using the edge of the bar as my zero point then when i go to cut all my pieces are going to be off because look at that the cutter wheel isn't against the bar so that's what the cutter gauge is for the cutter gauge when you're cutting this right here the edge of the cutter gauge that is your zero point so if i wanted to cut a two inch strip for example and i put my two inch mark against the bar well if i go ahead and cut there the cutting wheel isn't against the bar cutting gauge needs to come down right and then it shows me ah it wasn't two inches after all so i want to take this and i'm gonna get my two and a half inch marks so two inch two inch two and a half so i just want to put the the line right underneath that cutter gauge and i'm going to make a mark there and if you want you can write in two and a half inches so you don't forget right i need three quarters of an inch and i need one inch so i'm gonna pull this back to the one and i'm gonna say whoop there's my one inch and then i'm gonna pull it back to three quarters of an inch and mark oh there's my quarter or three quarters of an inch and then i do need some quarter inch strips so i'll go ahead and make that mark as well so i pulled out and get rid of my cutter gauge now i pulled out some different colors that i wanted to use i've got a turquoise blue i've got a white and i pulled out steel blue i like steel blue steel blue is fun steel blue when you full fuse it and you don't cap it instead of this beautiful blue color you get a silvery color which i thought would be really pretty as a snowflake so the bottom side that's against the shelf will still say blue because it's not getting any exposure to the air but the top side is going to be exposed to air and it's going to turn this lovely silver i don't have any samples to show you because i didn't think about pulling those out but i'll definitely post pictures somewhere in the next couple days after i get all these fired right okay so i was thinking i want to do um just a couple of embellishments in the middle here as silver maybe all of them silver i think i'm going to do like i did with the other one where i rotated the purple and the blue inside and out i'm going to do that with the silver so i that means i need two for each leg right and there's the three quarters of an inch strip so two times six is 12. i need 12 of those right so i'm going to have 12 of the steel and 12 of the blue and then i think i'm going to do white on the inside so i'm going to have uh these are the one-inch strips so this is going to be white this is going to be white and the squares here they could be a different color if you wanted to um they're going to be on the inside and i'll show you those when we get to them they're going to add that third layer because otherwise i won't have pieces you know that that meet with a nice even bridge so i'm going to start with the white we are going to cut six strips that are two and a half inches and a bunch of other strips so let's see when i'm working this out this is about six inches there so that's more than enough i'm just going to take this and cut my strips this way and i'm just going to cut six quarter inch strips so i'm going to have some extras and that's totally fine so i've moved my glass i want to line it up with that quarter inch strip because i need to cut a bunch of strips first so i'm going to cut six quarter inch strips and i'm going to break them off all together so here we go let's start at the top and usually when i'm cutting i'm standing up so hopefully my pressure is really good here and everything breaks evenly and where i tell it to um and not off in some silly direction one two three four five and one more all right i've made my cuts if maybe you can see my scores i don't know it's really hard with the um the white glass to see the scores but i'm going to break these off all together like this and these are my running pliers so if you're not familiar with running pliers when we score the glass the running pliers are what we're going to use to break them you put your score line in between the running pliers the jaws there they're pushing up underneath the score line and down on either side so you just want to make sure there's enough room for them to push up underneath the score line and down on either side and i'm going to hold back as far as possible give a nice gentle squeeze and it broke just where i wanted it to yay okay set that aside because we should be done with that so before i break all of these apart and have strips if i was prepping for class i would break all of these apart and just put a bunch of strips over there right because then everybody else is going to use the ruler and the markers make the marks i don't want to do that because i'm going to make a whole bunch of snowflakes to sell and if i do that i'm just slowing myself down so i've got a plan so i already know i need six two and a half inch strips so i'm gonna take this and move it over to the two and a half inch mark right there and i'm going to score that all right so now i can go ahead and break that off there are my two and a half inch strips and then remember i need 12 one inch strips and if you're not sure why i've made six strips yet it's because most of these patterns work in multiples of six so i can cut two one inch pieces off here so i'm gonna move my score line over where is that score line okay it's right there all right move that score line over um there we go and then i can cut my second one and then i can break those off there's that one there and i'm gonna break those in half so now i've got all of my strips and i am still torn about the other one i'll just go ahead and break these so since i've already scored these i'm gonna go ahead and break these into strips and this is how you would do it if you were prepping for a whole bunch of classes so notice how i broke them in groups of two from the six and then group and then broke those in the middle um you and i'm just gonna throw those in my my snowflake fodder pile so as you're breaking these apart you want um you want to break them off in groups of two that's going to make it a little bit easier for you to break them off if you're just breaking them off in groups of one what can happen is the glass can get stressed out and if your score line if there's something wrong with your score line or there was some friction whatever you end up with the glass can decide to break funky any time it wants to all right so i'm going to put my one inch pieces in there so if you break them off in groups at least you're cutting back on the stress between the glass because the glass the smaller strip is going to be the one that breaks so if you're trying to break a quarter inch strip off of a bigger piece over here sometimes it'll get those crazy cuts like we experienced earlier like some of the strips that i i was cutting you maybe notice that anyway all right twelve one inch strips six two and a half inch strips now i need 24 inch uh 24 3 4 inch strips and that's the one where i was going to alternate so that means i need um 24 inch strips i need 12 in the steel blue and 12 in the turquoise and this is what is this it's like that's plenty of room um how many is that that is like three and a half so three times four is twelve plus two is sixteen times two all right so i'm going to cut this in three quarter inch strips here just trying to do a little bit of math to see how i can save myself you know like i i don't really like adding to my snowflake fodder um because this is my personal snowflake potter versus the studio the teaching studio snowflake potter right okay no worries anyway that my math tells me 16 pieces times two that's plenty for my my weight okay i'm confused we'll just cut it and see how many i end up with right all right so i've made my mark that way i wanted to make another um all my other scores this way so that's 2 4 6 8 10 12 14. 16 and i only need 12. all right i got plenty so i'm not going to cut any more over here because i have plenty i will break those scores and then these will just go in my scrap bins um knowing no reason to make them smaller than they need to be if i don't need them that small because they're more versatile that way if i had a pendant class or i wanted to make a pendant this could be a pendant blank for somebody or it could be the you know it's much more you're versatile when it's bigger like that all right so i want to break the cut um i'm going to break it lengthwise first because i've got three quarters of an inch on either side and then i'll be able to break those apart and then i'm going to go ahead and come in here and i can break these in half we've got four and four and then i can break those in half and then i just break those down again all right so here we go nice and quick and easy now imagine you know this is going much quicker than somebody who might have to take a bunch of pieces out and make their marks and then cut them with the mosaic nippers right much quicker all right and my last color turquoise all right my turquoise one again um just not gonna do math this time let's see uh where will i okay so that is two inches divided by times four and that's probably plenty there all right all right so i've got my three quarter inch strips there and then i'm gonna go in and two four six and i'm just moving my score line over to that quarter inch mark eight ten look at that and twelve all right so i think that's enough i think that's everything i need i'm gonna go ahead and break those big ones off and then break this down the middle and then into groups of oh wait hmm what did i do here that's six oh yeah i only did 12. okay confusing myself here all right so now i've got all my little embellishments here i've got my white pieces there and there oh and i need the other pieces so i wonder if i should um maybe i'll do steel blue just for kicks um yeah why not i'm gonna go ahead and cut another couple of strips out of this and when i do the little squares i typically just use my mosaic nippers for those um remember these squares over here right i typically just use my most like numbers because it doesn't have to be perfect it just has to be about ish right um so i'm gonna go with the quarter inch six squares one two three four five plenty there i'm gonna cut one extra because this guy is a little bit um rounded at the top okay so here we go move my bar out of the way this guy i can pick him up and move him over to the next bunch the kiln shelf right we're going to go in here and put my parchment paper down and again i'm going to start with my legs now this is a little bit different so i'm going to take my legs and i'm going to put my legs down first and there's a couple ways that you can build this but with the super glue this way that i'm building here is actually pretty handy okay now remember before when i was saying that we did not oops here we go that we did not want to do something like this where we're balancing things in this case we can make an exception it generally turns out fine when you just have a couple of little embellishments typically they'll fall and they'll be able to stay you know they'll melt exactly where you put them but we're not going to worry about those first we're going to go ahead and do the inside first so the inside we need to start building some bridges right but before we can build any bridges we need to have another piece in here right because if we put if we put this piece down there there's nothing holding it together right okay so if i've got that together then i can take and i put a little bit of glue here and whoops a little bit of glue there and then i can build my bridge right see that bridge perfect so now remember when we go back to c i don't want to build this way first right i think i did something wrong here go like this all right there we go maybe i don't know i think i need more um i need 12 of those quarter inch squares for what i'm doing here because i did something wrong but if you get the pattern book it tells you everything that you need to know um it's obviously not snowflake season so i'm a little out of practice all right nothing like improvising though right okay so there we go i'm going to go ahead and build that one there and then i'm going to put another little guy here i think the other thing that i like to do with this one is i will take and do the outside pieces first so it just kind of depends on how you want this to turn out if you put the embellishment pieces down first then you only need the one-quarter inch square but i'm showing you a little bit more advanced way to do this right so let me just demonstrate that first for you though so if i take and put if i take and put these guys down first i'm just going to throw some down there in whatever form if i take and put those guys down first then i can also put this down first and then this piece goes across like that right and that's where you don't need to worry about multiple extra little quarter inch squares so what i'm showing you is a little bonus right you get to learn how to improvise with the pattern um the difference between these two is that that blue is going to be hidden underneath the white on the front side which is the rounded side you'll be able to see it from the back side but say you wanted to see it from the front side so you have the blue on the top well that's what we're doing over here okay so we're just going to need a couple of more more squares actually maybe i'll just change it up on you and then we'll just do it the way that i'm going to show you okay so if you're following the other way to do it great if not i'm switching it up on you right so i'm going to go like this what did she just do i turned everything sideways so we're going to do just like i showed you which means that i need my embellishments to go down first but i'll just go ahead and keep finishing this right wait so i need to go this way so i'm going to finish all of these pieces in the exact same way try not to confuse you too too much good luck all right keep up everybody all right so one there and one there and one there and one there all right so now i can put two more legs in here or two more bridges rather all right and let those set up but in the meantime i can start laying out some of my embellishments i'm sure i've confused you by now but we'll see we'll see what happens you'll figure it out when you see the end result it'll all make sense it will all be clear all right so there's just a couple we're going to go ahead and i like on these ones we want to put the glue where the pieces are going to overlap right because if the glue is where the pieces aren't overlapping then it's really not serving much of a purpose all right so i'm going to take this and put it down just like that right so now what i've done is i've got one layer my embellishments are one layer and my legs are one layer or the bridges are one layer right so i'm going to take this one too and do the same thing there and then i can show you why you only need six of the quarter inch strips if you build it this way versus the other way you'd need more all right okay so there we go now i've got a level area over here to build this bridge to connect them right so typically when i'm building this one this is a little bit more complicated and i warn people but once you figure it out it's not so bad so i usually make like a cheat sheet this is the cheat sheet whoops pick that up a little bit too soon this is the cheat sheet right the cheat sheet is telling people basically what exactly they need to build and you need to build six of these and if you build six of those then you can put them all down and then you connect the bridges all right so there's my first piece so now i can go ahead and connect the bridges and that's the spot where i can connect them make sure you get a little bit closer there all right so you can kind of start to see where this is going now i hope go ahead and flip that over and flip that one over and put some more put some more embellishments down so all my turquoise are going on the inside here and steel blue is going on the outside there just little baby dots of glue and then we'll put this across the top like that and then i'm able to connect the dots here so hopefully i didn't confuse you so much that you can't see where i ended up right just keep dropping pieces down there though all right so here we go now i've got half of my snowflake done right so i'm just going to keep building in that exact same way right so if i put these down first and then put my glue on those and build my bridges then i only need the six dots um if you were doing it the other way you'd end up needing even more dots in certain areas and there's nothing that says that you can't add more dots here and there i've done this pattern in the past and added some embellishments on the end of those to kind of make them a little bit bigger because where there's just one layer it's going to pull in where there's two layers it's going to stay exactly where it is right dealing with some volume control here all right let's do that so yeah the nice thing about the super glue is after these are all finished it makes it really easy to pick them up and load them in the kiln and i've got some pictures to show you here shortly but i may as well i'm so close i may as well just go ahead and finish this out these guys here and notice how i didn't put all of my pieces out initially right i just put some of them out right if i put down all of my embellishments all at once there's a bigger chance that they're going to get knocked around and that's just going to get people frustrated so i try and get people to just do one leg at a time for that reason but um sometimes you know sometimes people like to see how it's going to look all laid out and if that's the case remember tell them don't get really caught up on where you're putting everything because if you get really caught up and something shifts you're just going to be frustrated so if you can just get your layout close to where it needs to be and then you can go back and glue things together that way that you know you'll be able to see exactly where everything goes but you won't get frustrated because everything's moving around on you all right see already this one's moved so i'm just going to move it back into place and sometimes i have to actually hold down on the pieces i find it helps to kind of hold them in place that way because when that bottle hits sometimes it's a little tacky and it moves the pieces out of the way right all right so i've got one more over here and then i've got the one that fell and also the lid that fell right we'll go down there and all right where did that piece go here it is and the lid's way far away so i'll just get that later all right so there's snowflake c and i cut some extras so those will go into my snowflake water over here all right um so i uh you'll need to know how to fire these now so you know typically i'll wait until everybody leaves after you know if you're making these production style at your house just go get the kiln ready take a snack break before you load these you know especially these bigger ones the super glue really helps to hold all the pieces together i've used elmer's before and it is a nightmare all the pieces fall apart so by the time you get them from your paper into the kiln then you're basically rebuilding them in the kiln which kind of defeats the purpose of using the super glue because you can use the super glue in your studio space you can be nice and comfortable you don't have to be like over the kiln kind of like hunchback over your account right loading everything into the kiln right once you've got everything done it becomes really easy to pick these up and i'm kind of delicate with them you know i find a couple of points where i can pick them up and then when i load them in the kiln i just take and you know kind of figure out how they're best going to fit in the kiln right and that works for the the big ones as well a lot of times with the big ones what i'll do is um you know this one's not i'm not gonna trust this one to pick it up just yet because i just assembled it but what i'll do is i will take a piece of cardboard and put it on this side and then kind of flip it this way and then peel the paper off of it and then i'm able to kind of you know i can either put in the kiln upside down if i wanted to or you know flip it back over and pick it up and gently place it in the kiln right um so uh as far as the firing schedule goes like i said these pieces are really small so there's not a lot of volume or large pieces to worry about you know it's not like taking this piece and putting an account you can take these pieces and you can fire them in the kiln as fast as you want to go right so if especially if you're filming um firing in a fiber kiln if i'm firing it with a ceramic shelf sometimes i'll slow my firing schedule down a little bit because i've broken a ceramic shelf before and i don't want to break a ceramic shelf again so i'll fire a little bit more slowly with the ceramic shelf but in a fiber count put your fiber paper down you load these up you can go as fast as possible all the way up to you know between 14 20 and 1480 pick your poison there if you're at a lower temperature you'll hold for longer maybe 15 20 minutes if you're going to 1480 maybe only holding for five minutes the nice thing about firing to a lower temperature is sometimes you can reuse your fiber paper that's in the count typically the opaque will hold on to the fiber paper so it kind of it'll destroy it anyway so you have to use more um and then a nail as fast as possible down to 900 to 960 hold it for an hour and then i just typically let it cool down by itself and that's usually enough for annealing i do have a slide show to show you though so here's some of the kiln or the the snowflakes that are all finished these are student snowflakes um you can see this is snowflake b uh here's snowflake c another c c c uh no c this was my snowflake z or g so i have people take a post-it write their name on it and write the letter of the snowflake and then this is my photo documentation so before it goes into the kiln i take a photograph so i can be sure that when it comes out of the kiln i get the piece back to the person that it belongs to um if you had a bigger piece of paper you could have them write the colors that they used too and maybe that would be helpful in case something got misplaced or heaven forbid you lost a photo here's some more this is these are stuff like z that i didn't show you but this is in the additional patterns that i have on my etsy site right so just some different color combinations that you can do here's b and you can see on the corners or in the outside edges the embellishments i put a couple of little quarter inch pieces and added some embellishments to my embellishments um i think i did that here as well i put a little quarter inch piece on top of the green and the white and right here as well you know so i added a couple more embellishments to my embellishments here's some close-ups my my candy cane snowflakes in the studio in the wintertime and just some some more close-ups um of some of the fired snowflakes so you can see in the the full fuse schedule you can see how some of the pieces when they were a quarter of an inch how they get a little bit skinnier in the middles there right and here's the you know the little uh quarter inch pieces that make help fill the the gaps and the bridges so you can still kind of see those here's those embellishments on the embellishments i was talking about for snowflake b and you can even go in and make some like cut sheets out of glass on this one i used some stringers and i made some candy cane looking glass before i cut it into quarter inch strips and here's uh this is um the second additional patterns on that i have on the etsy site there are four additional patterns and then two of the patterns have alternate this is one of the alternates so these are all the same pattern but this is the alternate layout so it turns out just a tiny bit differently again this is uh this is from the first set and it's just a little bit different from from the original pattern and that's the candy cane snowflakes they're a lot of fun this is before they're fired and then you know you can see after they're fired i just thought i'd show you this is this is one of the countloads after the classes so this is a coffin kiln that we have at the studio it can hold a lot of snowflakes i think it's like four feet long by a couple feet deep so there's lots and lots of snowflakes and with the strips some people build christmas trees some people get creative with these and go nuts layering in different different ways here's one that i didn't show you but this is from the additional snowflake patterns and then i always like to have you know just white snowflakes can be really beautiful these look kind of on the table but put them in a tree at the studio i work at the people city mission in town here does a i think they call it starry night's christmas tree festival every year and they have designers design christmas trees and then those are auctioned off um for people in need uh the the proceeds go to people in need especially during the holiday seasons and we did a blue christmas tree with all white snowflakes so kind of an up-close view of some of these snowflakes this is the most complicated snowflake in the first set of instructions um lots of pieces there and i have some of my students that come in that do that i always generally say give yourself two hours for that one because it's going to take a long time if you have to make the marks on the strips and put those together it doesn't take quite as long if you're cutting them like we did on the last snowflake and you can see i did a variety of all of the the patterns so yeah that is that is it for the no days uh studio session with the fused glass snowflakes christmas in july so i used the honeydew super glue for this if you want to buy this you can head on over to the no days adhesives website i think you can even get it from the facebook page you just click on the the shop now page or whatever but the super glue i like to store this in the refrigerator when i'm not using it it has a two year shelf life from the production date so you look at the bottle and you find the production date on there and there i usually you know keep these pretty fresh i don't like to sit on them for long because otherwise they just go bad but keep them in the refrigerator and these guys will last you a good long time and you know it's it's like there i barely used any for this project i've got some other fusing projects that i use the super glue on too a lot of like multi multi-firing pieces you can tweak the way that you do those and arrange the pieces differently so maybe i'll post some photos to this thread to give you some inspiration when you're firing super glue just make sure you're not um you're you're giving yourself ventilation you've got a place for that air to go out to right um you don't want to be in your house with a bunch of super glue burning off you're not using a whole lot so you shouldn't be poisoning yourself that way right but you just want to make sure anytime you've got anything firing like when you smell the fiber paper burning off that's not a pleasant smell it gives people headaches too so you just want to make sure that your kiln is in a ventilated space when you're firing this stuff just like anything really um so yeah if you have any questions feel free to post the questions in the comment or email me at info no days adhesives.com and everybody enjoy the rest of your day thanks for joining in and we'll see you next time we do one of these

Channel: No Days Adhesives

Views: 12,750

Keywords: no days adhesives, fused glass, fused glass tutorial, free online fused glass tutorials, glass fusing for beginners, glass fusing techniques, fused glass tutorials free, fused glass tutorials youtube, fused glass mosaic technique, fused glass snowflakes, how to cut glass, using mosaic nippers to cut glass, super glue, zuper glue, fused glass holiday ornaments, how to make fused glass snowflakes

Id: LBmCkz2amvM

Length: 72min 59sec (4379 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020