Understand the Limits that Exist in Stained-Glass Projects

Video Transcript

Okay now some shapes are almost or entirely impossible to cut with a cutter okay, a laser might be able to do it but even, you know we don’t have lasers at home and even so really the issue is, is that glass is a substance that really you know it wants to fracture and break in a certain way. It is not really happy you know to be cut into shapes that kind of go against it’s nature and so what I mean to say is, there are some things that you know even though you might want to do it, you are not really going to be ever able to do it with stained glass. So I mean, kind of the most impossible thing would be to cut a hole in something. I mean you really can’t do a design where you know, let’s say you had a square piece of glass with a hole cut in it and then you could put a round piece of glass in the middle there, or maybe you know one of these little beads, okay this is not possible. It might be possible if you had again lasers or special tools or I don’t know, I don’t even know what kind of tools you would use to do it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still achieve this look, let’s say that if you do want a little circle inside of a square all you’ve got to do is break it up a little bit, okay so just make this four pieces. Yes it is more work and in the previous clip I said, okay we have made our work a little bit more difficult here but if you want to put a shape inside of another one you can’t cut a hole in a piece of glass and just insert it, you need to break it up into pieces like that. So that is one thing, another thing is, has to do with you know you can’t really cut a piece of glass that has too much of a, of a cut into it or too much of a curve into it. So for example it would be very hard if not impossible to cut a piece of glass with, I don’t know a shape like this okay, because being able to cut into a piece of glass and to stop this cut here or to stop this break here and stop this break here is really kind of against the nature of glass and even if by some miracle you could cut this piece you would risk this cut and this break to continue breaking all the way over to here, or for this one to continue breaking there. So if you want a shape like that make it in two pieces, okay so that is just kind of the idea, again a lot of really tight curves you know, I mean you really couldn’t cut a piece of glass like this, you know a shape you know like this, that would be you know, maybe some of the best glass artisans in the world could cut something like this very, very slowly and the way that it is done is by roughing it out first and then using very fine, kind of pliers to kind of make little what we call relief cuts in here and like clean it out, but this is really kind of a impossible sort of piece of glass to make and if you needed a shape like this, again the strategy is to break it up a bit, so you know, you know for example maybe this particular one might be a little bit more manageable if you were to, I don’t know maybe break it up in this way. I mean we still have some pretty difficult cuts in there but you know, I mean you can kind of see what I am doing, I am kind of breaking it up into pieces and of course I am making my work a little bit more difficult by making more pieces but at least I’m kind of sort of taking it out of the realm of the impossible and bringing it into the realm of at least the you know maybe feasible, but again this would be a lot of work so basically you know, you want to keep your shapes simple, if you want to do complex things or complex shapes you really want to break them up.

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