Shelby's Life and Whatnot

News Flash: Glass is Sharp!

Total days cutting glass: 2
Total number of flesh wounds: 11

Ah yes, cutting time is when we separate the adept from the mostly adept and from the not-so-adept (NSA). Today's big winners are the following:

The Eye Guy (Not-So-Adept #1). The Eye Guy is so named because his design basically features a giant eye. He is notorious for not really bothering to follow directions and was already on his way to NSA status. But what made him a full-fledged NSAer? Well, he cut ALL of his glass at home and then walked around like a rooster crowing about it. Then he spread the word about how smart he was--cut your glass with the pattern side down, because you want the textured side to be on the front--and he figured this out all by himself--heh heh. After instructing a few people to follow his method, our teacher actually had to stop class to correct him: 1) cut with the pattern face up so you can see the information on the pattern like the directional arrow and number of the piece, and 2) When a glass window is displayed, the smooth side is facing out.

Additionally, since he'd cut all of his pieces with no supervision (she specifically said we could practice at home but not the cut the whole thing and that she wanted to check our progress as we moved through each piece) he'd done several things wrong--the most obvious being the edges of just about every single cut. When you cut glass, if you haven't gotten up against the pattern you take your pliers and take out small chunks along the edge. It works but it's not ideal as it can result in "shells" (chips taken out of the body of the glass) and a very rough edge. Well, The Eye Guy's edges looked like the surface of a road that needed to be paved, and he had more shells than Sally at the Seashore. As our teacher stood looking at his pieces she said, "you'll have to recut this one. You'll have to recut this one. This one too. Oh! This one is salvageable--oh wait, no, you'll have to recut it. Do you have any extra glass?" "Uh, no, I threw it away." "OKAY, CLASS?" she said. "You want to keep your extra glass, in case you make mistakes or in case you want to make a smaller project." Uh, yeah. So as a result, the now crestfallen Eye Guy spend 3 and a half hours rubbing his pieces on the grindstone--a method that is at once rather ineffective and hard on the ears. And he's going to have to buy most of his glass again, which wasn't exactly cheap.

The honors for NSA #2 go to Overalls Woman (a woman wearing overalls). She failed to score her glass very well and then was completely unable to break it along the non-existent score. When that happens, it generally breaks wherever it wanted to. Our teacher showed her a number of times what to do, but Overalls Woman insisted that she was okay. And then came the swearing, and the swearing, and the swearing...

Okay, so where do I fall on the spectrum? Well with my 6 additional wounds, I'm not quite adept, but I think I fall squarely in the Mostly Adept category. I took my time and while I didn't get as much cut as everyone else, I was very happy with my cuts and my teacher praised me for several of them. And most of my wounds were due to my own carelessness of handling pieces once they were cut instead of actual wounds from cutting incorrectly. And as for the wounds themselves, NOBODY left the class today without at least one bleeder--includin the teacher!

All in all I'm gaining a LOT more confidence and am really starting to enjoy myself!