Playing With Glass...Part 1

Okay.  This is my first tutorial.  A somewhat permanent record of this project.  I bought a glass etching kit a while back and never used it.  The thought of how caustic that concoction is and my lack of coordination at times made me nervous.  I had to use it because the creative juices were screaming ideas - that and the fact that I could no longer return the darned thing because I'd kept it too long - so I dove in yesterday.

Here is what you need to do this project (I think, since I haven't actually completed it yet!):

Frog Tape (painter's tape found in home improvement stores)
paper towel
paper punch
Armor Etch
gloves
paintbrush
glasses
Marvy Deco Color permanent inks

Okay. So I came up with the idea to punch out some flower shapes from the tape.  It is time consuming and towards the end, the hole punch got stuck so this idea only works with a hole punch you may not mind losing or was "borrowed" from a scrapbooking buddy you don't see anymore! ; )  I'll see if WD40 helps unstick my hole punch later.

Next, I washed and thoroughly dried the glass with paper towel, and then applied the flower cutouts randomly around the glass.

Put paper towel or newspaper around your work area so that any spilled etching cream won't make you have to stop what you're doing to clean it up.  The window of working with this product is small.

With your gloves on, pour out the etching cream carefully on to the glass and spread evenly (with as few strokes as possible, see explanation below) with the paintbrush.  You should have a nice even coating on the glass.

The directions say to leave it on for only a minute, I have heard some crafters say to leave it on for up to 1/2 hour! I had it on for about 5-6 minutes.  This is right before I washed it off.

Be sure that you are not rinsing this out in a wash basin that is plastic.  It should be a stainless steel sink.  Run lukewarm water over it.  If you want (with gloves still on) use some paper towel to rub off the etching cream.  If the punch outs fall off, don't worry about it, you're rinsing off the cream anyway. (I like to run the water for a minute or more longer to make sure none of the cream residue is in the sink and flushed from the pipes.)

Remove any left over punch outs, dry off the glass and clean up your work area.  Here is the glass.

I am not sure how I feel about it right now.  The next step is to add the permanent inks.  The directions did say that if you work with a large area, the imperfections of the glass might show thorough.  They also don't tell you that the brush strokes do affect how the finished product looks, so keep that in mind. Try to use strokes in the same direction and don't go over already touched areas if possible.

I think the negative space shouldn't have been the flowers, the reverse might have looked better.  We'll see how it "cleans up" with the inks.  Off I go.