Learn Basic Tips for Cutting Glass for Stained-Glass Patterns

Video Transcript

All right, the third thing that you want to think about when choosing a pattern or when designing your own is how many total pieces are you going to have to cut in order to make this pattern work out. And this isn’t only about how much work is involved because obviously the more pieces that there are in your project the more cutting, the more preparing and the more wrapping with foil or the more cutting of lead cane you will have to do, the more soldering you will have to do. But that is only half of the concern, the other half of the concern about doing a project with many, many pieces versus a few pieces is actually getting it all to fit together and so the idea is this. Let’s imagine that you had a design that had a triangle in it, okay so if you just cut a triangle out of glass right, then that is one piece and you know it will, it is fairly easy to fit into the surrounding pieces. Let’s say that we cut that triangle up into two pieces, well that is still fairly simple, let’s say it is two pieces, there will be a solder joint there. Nice thing about this, is that we could have the two pieces be slightly different colors but now we are at an issue where they need to be aligned with each other pretty precisely and they kind of need to be cut correctly so that they can still integrate well with the rest of the pattern and we can take this idea further. If we still want kind of a triangular element in our design but let’s say that we make it, we build it out of several pieces you know, this is still possible but now, you know here is a triangle built out of one piece, two pieces, six pieces. Again this is going to take a lot, not just a lot more time and work to get this triangle to work out, but it takes a lot more accuracy and a lot more skill to get these pieces to exactly the right shape and size so that they fit together cleanly and will integrate into whatever kind of the rest of the pattern on the outside is. And so again, for beginners you know, I am drawing this a little bit sloppy there, but still I mean you know, if this was a triangle integrated into a larger design, the triangle all by itself is the easiest of these three options you know for integrating it with pieces that are outside here somehow, this is the most difficult. That is not to say you shouldn’t be encouraged to always push yourself into more and more difficult design elements but it is definitely something to think about, that designs with, that achieve the same thing with fewer pieces are going to be a lot easier for you to do as a beginner than designs that have a lot more pieces required to puzzle them together. And, and a big part of that again is not just the amount of work that is required but the precision that is required to kind of get them to fit all together.

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