How To Make Glass Jewellery

Hi. I'm Jessica from the London Jewelry School and today, I'm going to show you how to make some jewelry. This project is how to make glass jewelry, and for it, you will need a pair of running pliers, some black bullseye glass, some clear bullseye glass, a piece of dichroic glass, a silver-plated backing for a pendant, some medium grit sandpaper, a ruler - this ruler is a cork backed ruler, which is ideal, but if not, you can use a standard ruler - an oil cutter, a cutting mat, you'll also need a kiln shelf, some fiber paper for the kiln, and you'll also need a kiln.

Now I'm going to show you how to cut your glass. So, you start with this square of dichroic, which is the size we want our pendant to be, and I'm going to back it with some black bulls-eye glass, which I want to make the same size. So I'm going to use the squares on my grid to make sure that they mark up.

Using your ruler, you're going to place it on the glass you want to cut, and place it a little farther along from where you want it to be cut, because when you're using your cutter, it's going to take a little bit off. Place your cutter with the screw side facing up, down onto your glass, and in one swift movement, pull all the way down against the ruler. Using your running pliers, making sure that you have the arrow facing upwards, you're going to place it on your glass where you've made the groove, and push, giving it a nice clean cut.

And I'm going to do the same along the bottom to make it approximately the same size. Always move extra glass out of the way when you're cutting. So I have my backing, and I have my dichroic.

Now I'm going to put a layer of clear glass on the top. Now, the clear glass on the top needs to be slightly bigger than my dichroic. The reason for that is because as the glass fuses, the clear glass will fuse over the top and towards the sides of the piece.

If it's exactly the same size, it won't cover all the way around the side of the piece. So, using my grid again, I'm going to measure where I want to cut my piece and use exactly the same technique with the oil cutter. Don't worry too much if your squares of glass aren't completely square, because as they fuse in the kiln, everything will round at the edge.

Once you've cut all your glass to size, you're going to layer it, ready to go in the kiln. Then I'm going to get my kiln shelf and fiber paper and place my stack neatly in the middle. If you're firing more than one piece of glass at a time, make sure you leave ample room around the edge so that they don't fuse together.

And now I'm ready to pop it in the kiln. So I'm going to put our glass piece into the kiln, making sure that when you put it in, you don't jog the piece too much, and I'm going to close the door. Now the firing for a full fuse, is we're going to ramp it at 800 degrees centigrade per hour, to 800 degrees centigrade, and when it gets to that temperature, we're going to hold it for twenty-five minutes.

It will take approximately an hour for that firing to go ahead, plus the extra twenty-five minutes for the piece, so it will be finished in about an hour and a half, but because it's glass, we need to let it cool down slowly. So we're going to come back in a couple of hours and take it out of the kiln, once the kiln is completely cooled. Our dichroic glass piece out of the oven: it's got a bit bigger, because they do grow.

But now we need to attach a back on, so that we can wear it as a pendant. The first thing to do, is at the back where we're going to attach it, we want to gently rub it with some sand paper, just to roughen it up. And that gives us a key for where we're attaching it with the glue.

Just give it a quick rub, and also on the back of your pendant bail. And now we're ready to mix. We have Araldite here, which is a two-part epoxy hardener, which we're going to use to attach it onto the back.

And you mix equal amounts of both parts, so I'm just going to