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Different Ways to Cut Glass Out

Ultimately, you don't want to waste glass, but you still want to have a good looking project. Here are a few tricks of the trade:

1. Cutting a cluster of shapes from one piece of glass. This is where you get, for instance, a flower, trace it onto the glass and cut the whole thing at once. Your advantage is, you'll get a perfectly fitting flower in half the time it would have taken you to cut out each petal separately. But the downside is if you used a glass with a "grain", it will show up with all the grain going in the same direction. With a flower, for instance, you would probably want the grain to go in the direction that the petal grows. With that in mind, you can use this method when doing skies, water backgrounds, and when using Baroque. The difficulty of this method is that you have to figure out a way to "unlock" all the pieces, without cutting or breaking any of them. Just take your time cutting. This BTW is how the water in the fish lamp was made.
2. Next is individual cutting. This might waste some glass, but the result is usually worth it. This is when you want to give a special direction to the piece. For instance, if you wanted to show the growing direction of a flower, or the flow of the sky. In order to make a flower, you would usually cut out all the pieces in a row with and up and down direction.
3. This tip is a lot like the above one, only you choose a particular section of the glass for the piece you are cutting out. Say you were cutting out a, oh I don't know, a trumpet vine. And you wanted that streak of orange red going down the center. You could find the "right" section of glass, place it down and cut it out. Now that's all fine and good, but it wastes, possibly, a huge sheet of glass. The only time I would use this method (on large sheet), is for a project that is made up of many of those flowers because I would be using the entire sheet of glass and that special pattern would be for the flower that is the center of interest. Otherwise it would be a waste. I usually try to find these interesting colorations in a piece of scrap glass.
4. Strip cutting, is usually for boxes, but it can be used for things like borders too. Say you were making a 3" x 3" square and it was divided into 1" sections (like 3 flavor ice cream....mmmm ice cream). And for arguments sake, let's say it was antique. You really don't want to dice up a very expensive sheet like that. You could cut out the 3" piece in one square, but that would also remove a 3" section of scrap. Or you could cut it off with a diagonal sweep, but that would give you 2 useless triangles. The best way would be to cut out 1" strips. This way you won't waste a lot of glass; you may even be able to cut it out of the odd sides.
5. And of course, there's the band saw method. It can cut a corner from a piece of glass, but at the same time it can also scratch up the back of the glass. Unless I really had to use it (for an unusual cut or if I don't want to waste any part of the glass), I usually cut it by hand.

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Started on 9-22-98