Crack ’em!
Clean your puddles and turn them over. You should see concentric rings of colors:
Using firm pressure, score your puddle in the middle with a glass cutter:
If you are able, break the glass using running pliers.
Often, the glass is too thick to break this way. An alternate method is to set the glass on two pencils (as shown below) an give the glass a firm wack with the edge of the hammer’s face. The score line must face down! (The dashed line in the image below indicates the direction of the score that has been made on the opposite surface of the glass).
And, of course, you should wear eye protection any time you hit glass with a hammer 🙂
The results should look like the photo on the right.
Take a good look at the edge revealed by the break. You’ll see the same colors you stacked in the kiln – only each layer is now much thinner. Here’s one of my samples:
Using your tools of you choice, continue to break the puddle into small pieces. I prefer a pair of mosaic nippers (with our easy-to-make Mosaic Catch-O-Matic).
Continue until you have a variety of pieces, as shown in the photo below:
We could stop here and probably find a million ways to use these striped chunks (and, at the end of this tutorial, there’s a pair of examples of where I do just that) – but we’re putting these pieces back in the kiln.
Back to Fused Glass “Puddles” Start
