Glass Etching First Attempt

I’m sat here now on the sofa, bored as hell, as I have managed to screw up both of my ankles and feet.

My left ankle was injured last year, quite severely, and has never fully recovered, so as such I have problems and pain with it every day, and after a day of cutting wood at the weekend and then going exploring a new city yesterday and walking for miles, my right ankle and foot is playing up.

To be honest I am hobbling around like some guy who has just crapped himself, so I figured while I am stuck here I will share my first recent attempt at glass etching.

Here in Bulgaria with every house you move into, you will find a mass of spare glass just lying around the place, and our house is no exception, ranging from panes that we could reuse for our windows, through to broken pieces that have no real use anymore.

So I figured that I would get out my multitool and have a play, after all if I got it wrong and broke the glass, or screwed up my design, then what the hell, there is nothing really lost and I haven’t wasted a ton of money in the process of learning.

I found a stencil that we had brought with us, this design is going to be incorporated in the poker area, and was going to trace around it, when my wife had a brilliant idea. She found a piece of spare card, got out her little roller brush and used the stencil to paint onto the card.

As it turned out, this was a genius idea, not only did it mean that I couldn’t damage the stencil, but it also meant that I had dark solid bold lines and shapes to follow.

So once the paint had dried (which didn’t take long in 35 degree heat) I proceeded to put the stencil under my pane of glass and taped it to it. Note this is well worth doing as one you don’t have sharp edges that you can cut yourself on, and secondly it stops the stencil moving around.

I tried to use the tattooist method of having the stencil facing in one direction and not moving it, as this is how you should hone your skills, but I’ll be frank, I’m not that skilful, so there were multiple times, where I would spin the glass around so that I could get a better angle to work at.

I’m quite pleased with this attempt, and will be saving it to incorporate it somewhere in a future project.

So here it is, my first attempt at glass etching, feel free to let me know your thoughts below.

FYI some of the scratches that you see are on the table surface and not the glass.