I'm fairly certain that I don't have any readers yet, but if I do - firstly, I apologize that I wasn't aware of you. :) And secondly, I apologize for having said I would post....2?, 3?...weeks ago. Here I am, to cover some projects from past and present so we can both get an idea of what we're working with... :) I will be doing these as separate blogs, as the picture uploading tools provided to me by blogger confound me!
Just after Christmas, my brother's girlfriend's sister commissioned me to make her 4 wine glasses. Her instruction was for the glasses to be voluminous, and aesthetically "fun." Bro's GF provided me with info that sister likes animal prints. I Googled "animal prints," and decided on 4 designs, 1 for each glass - giraffe, zebra, tiger, and cheetah.
This is the cheetah print in progress. The whiter/lighter parts are where the etching cream is clouding the light coming through - where the finished product will be etched. The darker areas are where the removable adhesive shelf liner (such as Contact brand) is stuck to the glass - where the finished product will still be clear.
I have learned from previous accidental experiments working with etching cream that it's fairly easy to make streaky patterns in the final design. You can do this by putting the cream very thinly on the glass surface. However, there are many factors that change what kind of "streaky" it is. If you use the grainier bits of the cream and spread what is there quite thinly, you can make a very light brush, sometimes that can be more than half opaque.
For parts of the cheetah glass (the bits that would be black on a real cheetah), I also left covered when I initially etched. After rinsing the first coat, I took the bits off that would be black, and did the very thin layer, though thick enough that it would still be mostly etched. I only left that 2nd coat on long enough to finish brushing it over the whole glass. (Time is another factor in the streaky-etching, though since it works so quickly anyway, it's less important than thickness.)
Cheetah...rawr.
Giraffe!
Zebra - turned out very well! It was both Cassidy's and Turtle's favorite.
Tiger - meow! This one actually gave me quite an unexpected challenge. My initial pattern looked more like clouds floating in a clear glass sky, but I had already etched it on! So I checked out multiple images of tigers online and created a new pattern that worked around the existing "cloud" mess that had been on there already. Just as I had hoped, the original etchings showed under the new etching just enough that it added a hint more texture to the final glass. Definitely a win. :)
So...that was, oh I don't know, major glass project #1? Next stop, the Karen/Jill project!
As I was reading through this I thought of a couple of other details!
ReplyDeleteThe zebra glass is the only one that was completely "black and white" - that is, it is either completely clear, or completely opaque. To do this, the cream must be spread liberally over the entire area to be etched. I probably use more than you need to but I have had some otherwise-great projects be a bust from accidental streakiness.
Also, when I was speaking of streakiness in this post, it is from the perspective of wanting to achieve the texture/pattern differences the methods bring. BUT I originally learned how to achieve these differences through mistakes. And they are very easy to make if you're not careful. :)