My First Glass Etchings

I've always liked the idea of writing a blog, but I thought "I don't have anything to write about that people will want to read" or "There isn't just ONE thing I could focus on". Then recently when doing some crafty stuff I thought "Who cares?? If I find the stuff I do fun and interesting someone else might too". 
Of course with the joys of Pinterest I figure someone will see something they like.
So here I am. 
Hello. I'm Georgie. Welcome to my blog. Today I am going to show you some glass etching I have done.

Etched Pie Dish
Being a bit of a Pinterest addict there is no way I could have missed all the etched glass tutorials. The minute I saw it I knew I wanted to give it a go. I did a bit of research and had a lot of trouble finding everything I needed in Australia.

I used this tutorial from Make it and Love it:
http://www.makeit-loveit.com/2010/06/glass-etching.html

The dreaded Armour Etch

The first problem I encountered was that no where stocked Armour Etch. I tried craft shops, hardware stores, and even the internet. Nowhere in Australia. (If anyone knows of anywhere in Aus, PLEASE tell me!). I ended up ordering it online somewhere, so I had to wait a week or so for it.

Next problem was that I don't own a craft cutter machine of any sort, and I also don't know where to find vinyl. Australia's a great place to live, but the internet only shows me how little access we have to things. Half the recipes I find from the States use ingredients that just wouldn't exist here or I've never heard of, and lots of the craft tutorials list brand names and I don't know what the equivalent product is. So custom cut vinyl was out. I decided to give stickers a go, and try using a craft knife to cut contact. But by absolute chance I came across some self adhesive stencils in Arthur Daley's (Swanston St, Melbourne) and bought the whole range cos I knew I would use them and they were only $2 a sheet.

Now I had the stencils and Armour Etch on the way, I just needed to find my pie dish. Another problem. HOW COULD SUCH AN EASY TUTORIAL BE SO HARD?? Almost every dish I found was Pyrex, which they specify cannot be etched. Eventually I found the perfect sized and shaped one at Kmart. I got home and read the info on it, just out of curiosity and it said it cannot be used above 120 degrees Celsius. WHAT?? I don't think I've ever cooked anything at such a low temperature. Most pie's need at least 180 and up to 220! So i returned it. I found the exact same looking one with a different label at a $2 type shop (cost me $5.50) and it didn't say anything about temperature, so I bought it. I made sure I tested it in the oven before I etched it though.

When my etching cream arrived, I was ready!
I masked off the areas I wanted to keep clean, stuck on the stencil, put on my gloves (apparently the cream "may be fatal") and got to work.

 

My pie dish with its stencil, covered in Armour Etch

I repeated this process for the next two doilies on the stencil. The biggest one you can see on the right above was quite tricky when it came to peeling it off and I ripped it, but the result was still fine.

Almost finished product

I did the three doilies* then decided that I need to find a fourth whole doyley* design to go in that last gap. I actually made this over a month ago and it is still unfinished as I am yet to find my doyley. It's tricky because I need it to be adhesive. I was thinking of using a fabric one, but I'm not sure how to do that quite yet. Otherwise I love it!

*This word annoys me a lot. I dont like the look of doyleys as a plural, nor do I think doilie/doiley looks right for singular!

CD's Pi Dish
A favourite friend of mine is a high school Maths teacher. A lovable nerd. He celebrates Pi Day on the 22nd of July and the 14th of March. I laugh. But secretly I love it, and I love the excuse to make him a present. Last year I made him a card which I stamped a heap of decimals of Pi onto. It took a while. This year since I was on a roll with the glass etching I decided to make him a Pi themed pie dish.

The stickers I used to make Pi around the edges of the dish

More than half way through sticking on the numbers. This was the hardest part because I'm mildly dyslexic I really had to concentrate to make sure the numbers were in order, because I knew my friend would know if they were wrong.

In the centre using contact I cut out a stencil in the shape of Pi. It was a bit tricky to put on the dish, but worked out well. The etching's a bit blotchy, but on the bottle it says it doesn't work on large areas.

On the side I wrote the symbol =, and then ended it with <3 g.

The last photo shows how I brought the letters under as I got back to the start of each line.

As you can see here my '=' became a '-' and my 'g' is missing a bit too. I googled if there was a way to fix it and discovered that a little bit of clear nail polish managed to fix it, and it appeared to be exactly the same after it had been put in the oven too. So that was good to discover.

I even managed to learn about 25 decimals of Pi to impress my friend while I was making this.

I forgot to take a photo, but I gave it to him with an apple pie baked inside it, and once we'd eaten some of it I told him what it was.

Hope you enjoyed my first ever blog.