When the Spouse bought his bead blaster, one of the “selling points” in his pitch to me was “you can use it to etch glass for prizes”. I think he may have regretted that yesterday as I had him conscripted into helping me etch 54 pieces of glass as prizes for this weekend’s race meet.

I adapted a 1912 Ludwig Hohlwein design for the vinyl cutter; this meant a fair amount of detail had to be removed and some of the angularity softened. Once the vinyl had been cut, the actual design was weeded, leaving a negative image. The remaining vinyl was applied to the glass, the piece was masked, and off it went to the garage to get blasted!

And the results:

In total, thirty glass plates, sixteen 6″ rectangular vases, four 9″ rectangular vases, and four 7″ large vases were etched. All the glass came from IKEA so this ended up being a pretty cost-effective load of prizes.

More importantly for me, etching these pieces gave me some ideas for other “negative image” pieces I might do in the future. (And I’m sure the Spouse will be glad to hear that they DON’T involve the bead blaster!)

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