In Reply to: Protecting Glass when Guilding posted by Robert Beverly on July 28, 19102 at 22:59:59:
Hi Robert,
There are a lot of issues and techniques here. First, when doing our glass art pieces, we order a bunch of extra clear glass from the glass company. As it turns out, many of the scratches in the glass were coming to us that way before we ever put down a single color. Now, we inspect each piece carefully prior to working on them and use the scratched ones as test color pieces.
At quite a few of the Letterheads Gold Leaf Workshops that I have seen Noel Weber teach, he frames each piece, and that frame is then fastened to a bracket. You can flip the glass over to view it at any time, but the glass never touches a backboard.
When we work on our limited edition glass pieces, we use numerous silk screens, and that stops us from using any sort of frame as mentioned above. We buy that little peel and stick felt buttons, often used on cabinet doors to keep them from making a noise when being closed. We put one in each corner of each piece and sometimes more if the glass is larger. We also put them down on the screen table, and all over on the easle where they are going to placed. The felt buttons helped a lot, but we became very careful about never sliding glass, even when putting it into the screening jigs. We also use 6" x 9" soft cell foam pieces that we normally pack with our CD collections. They were cheap and come in very handy throughout the year as sign spacers, even for 4x8s.
After spending an hour or two polishing out a few small scratches on the front of a few pieces, I cringe at Letterheads meetings when I see someone laying their glass, face down onto a gritty, rough table.
I am sure there are a lot of other ways of protecting glass while working on them, but I don't think I would use clear mylar on my pieces. Good luck,
Mike Jackson
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