I had been dreading tonight's class ever since I finished cutting all my straight-edged pieces last week. The time had finally come to cut the curved pieces in real - which is to say, expensive - glass.
But I hadn't had a go at the grinder yet, and this seemed as good a reason as any to put off the inevitable for a few moments more, and get acquainted with this much-lauded device. I unwrap and examine all my cut pieces to see which ones needed fine-tuning. Looks like a mighty-molared little mouse got into the glass storeroom over the week. Err, is my cutting really this horrible?
I take them over to the grinder, which turns out to be most disappointing. It is really slow going and keeps washing off the Vivid I used to number each piece as well as mark which bits to grind off. I have about ten or eleven pieces that require grinding. That's not bad out of the total twenty, but it still means slow, boring grunt work on a machine I had expected a lot from.
It is about an hour before I get all the pieces ground as close to the template size as I can. There is still an hour left to go, and I can't delay cutting the curvy pieces any longer. After all, there are only four classes left after tonight, and I still have to copper-foil, solder and mount the thing. I break out the sheets of practice glass, and have a terrible time producing all sorts of shapes other than the one I am supposed to be creating.
I actually feel like crying or stamping my feet at this point, thinking with rising panic of all that beautiful orange glass about to be ruined by my incompetence. I grab the template and roughly sketch two straight lines on the skirt of the lamp, cutting it off at its curviest part. "This," I tell Greg, "is my new design. I can't do the curvy bits!" It's possible that I am whining. He is kind but very firm, and won't let me change the template. "You will be unhappy with yourself if you do that. Here, I'll show you something". He demonstrates a way of making two individual cuts to get the one piece . It makes complete sense. I am able to make strong scores in the glass without careering wildly off the line. I give it a few tries with the practice glass and soon feel brave enough to try it on the real thing.
I soon have a curvy orange piece which is about four millimetres too wide on one side. I ask Greg if there's any way I could get at it with a glass cutter instead of spending what I know will be an age at the grinder. Four millimetres is almost too small for a glass cutter, so he shows me how to grind it down.
Guess what?
Turns out I was doing it all wrong before! As appears to be the case with all my stained-glass ineptitudes so far, it was all down to timidity. I had been merely grazing the grinder head with the edge of the glass. That's why it was taking so long. So the glass grinder really is a thing of beauty and a joy forever - when used correctly. In no time at all, that four millimetres is gone and I have my first curvy orange piece, perfectly cut and ground to size.
I'm terribly excited about next week's class now. The lampshade has thirty pieces altogether. Twenty-one are now cut and ground to size, nine to go. And I know I can do it.
