How do you create lovely stained glass mosaic tables? Once you know these basic steps, your creativity can take over. If you want something truly unique in a mosaic table, forget the many common styles of round mosaic bistro tables on metal stands that look they were produced on an assembly line. Instead, try integrating a beautiful stained glass design onto the table top of a piece of real-wood furniture.
Start with an unfinished table from a local or online store that deals in unfinished furniture. If you buy online, shop around because you can oftentimes find the same products in a wide price range. Search for "unfinished furniture" and you'll get tons of hits. The pieces that I buy are usually made of parawood, which is a hard wood from the Malaysian rubber plantations. Its density compares to birch or ash and its strength rates the same as maple.
Stain, seal, and finish the table with high-quality products. Use rags or paintbrushes to apply the stain and topcoat. If using rags, I suggest wearing plastic gloves. Check your local super center for a box of a ga-zillion of them for only a few bucks. They're cheap, but they work. Wood furniture can also be painted for dramatic results. For example, white is a nice color for breezy, beachy decors. The protective topcoat over stain or paint can be gloss, semi-gloss, or satin, depending on your preference.
Prepare the table top to receive the stained glass by painting it with white primer. The white color helps make the stained glass look bright and beautiful when laid in-place. Although a piece of stained glass may appear opaque, it oftentimes is merely translucent and the white background of the table top helps keep the glass color bright. Draw the stained glass pattern directly on the painted table top.
Following the pattern, measure and cut each piece of stained glass using the appropriate tool, which depends on the piece's shape and complexity. Grind the edges of each piece to remove all sharp edges. This ensures exposed edges on the tabletop are blunt so no one can injure themselves when dusting, wiping, cleaning, or otherwise using the tabletop. Most online stained glass stores offer decent glass grinders between $90 and $150. Sometimes the local hobby store has them for sale at half price. You don't need the heavy-duty, industrial-strength, super-duper grinder that costs $250. The cheap $100 unit is usually just fine for the average glass crafter. If you work with stained glass and glass tiles, then you ought to bite the bullet and buy a glass grinder.
When all the stained-glass pieces are in-place, apply the grout. After the grout cures, apply a high-quality grout sealer to help protect the grout color from dirt and spills. After the sealer thoroughly dries, clean and buff the glass with paper towels or a clean, soft cloth.
For a nice added touch, sign the furniture piece on the bottom side of the tabletop using a permanent felt-tip pen. The result is a beautiful piece of art that serves a functional purpose in the home or office. Each piece of stained glass mosaic furniture is truly unique, even when using the same pattern because no two glass pieces can be hand-cut exactly the same.
Listed below are more articles related to the above article from the "Crafts Hobbies" article category.
People interested in the above article "Glass Mosaic Tile Art: Creating Mosaic Tables" are also interested in the related articles listed below:
Do you want to know how to make scrapbooks? Then Cricut cartridges will be the best choice for you to do that. It will enable you to make your own storyline and creative ideas with different cartridges. To make use in the scrapbooking, you will get various stickers and other materials. You have come to the right place if you love to make scrapbook and there are many people who love doing this.
It is definitely not the most glamorous and it can be extremely difficult to see how stamp collecting can appeal to anyone, but believe it or not it is one of the biggest hobbies in the world. Your probably sat reading this thinking there is no way in hell that stamp collecting interests me, but you never know when it will just catch up with you and trap you forever. It might just start with someone giving you a gift of two or three interesting stamps, then next thing you know you require another and another and before you know it you're a collector. This is actually how my mother's thimble collection started, no Joke. She never dreamed of becoming the thimble collector and now has hundreds.
Having a baby is one of the most amazing things in your life. Enjoy it before your baby grows up for you may hardly recognize it when your baby has grown up. From the moment he or she was born, every little thing happened to them or whatever they do is worth remembering. It is important to keep down the physical changes of them as well as the milestones they achieve such as first words, first steps, first tooth, first haircut and so. It seems impossible to remember all those wonderful moments. Fortunately, you can record and preserve every precious story in a baby scrapbook.
A photo collage is a mixture of photos, images, texts, random materials or any of these combined to create one single image. Collage making is an art project that almost everyone is interested in. The ideas to form the photo collage create the soul of the collage. The theme is applied based on your idea and the collage style varies from it. Yet there is no hard and fast rule as to what you should use to create a photo collage, so use your creativity and have fun. Here are some photo collage ideas you can use.
Looking for something new in your mosaic art? Here's a fresh idea. Make mosaics using large stained-glass pieces as if making a stained-glass window, instead of using small pieces cut to the stale, standard shapes of squares, rectangles, and triangles. After following that traditional practice for so long, I grew bored with it and wanted something different. I removed my mosaic-artist hat and donned my stained-glass-artist hat for a nice change of pace. After making a few stained-glass hangings, it dawned on me. Why not combine mosaic art with stained-glass art? My first piece turned out beautifully, better than expected, and I haven't looked back since. Let's discover how you, too, can make these wonderful mosaics.
Christmas crafts- How to make a Christmas tree. Christmas is an annual holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus. On Christmas day, people gather with family and friends to enjoy a festive meal and exchange gifts as they celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.
Instead of lazing out on a late Saturday afternoon and vegetating in front of the television, you may want to pursue creative activities, such as do-it-yourself print projects. Weekends or even weeknights can be serve as a bonding time with your friends and even children. You can let your creative juices flowing as well as be able to create new memories to treasure for the rest of your lives. A holiday or an occasion special to your family may be looming in, so you may have to opt for personalized greeting cards, for example.
