Scraps

I spent this past weekend cleaning up my scraps of glass, and good grief did I have a lot of them. They were starting to take over my work area, so it seemed like time.

You might wonder: why is there so much scrap? Well, a lot of mine comes from the corners of the glass after you cut out a circle. It's an odd shape that doesn't serve any practical purpose.

One thing I do a lot to get rid of scrap is make pot melts. This is where you put the pieces of glass into a flower pot in the kiln and heat it up until the glass flows through the opening. The potmelt can then be used by itself, as in my ruffle plate and pot melt clock, or it can be sliced and used as an element in another piece, like this one ->

Depending on the size of the scraps, I may cut out some small circles to use in later projects. More often, I'll end up cutting some small squares to keep on hand - it's just easier than the circles!

<-This piece was made using a lot (A LOT) of the squares that I cut up this weekend.

And some scraps of glass are just too small to cut into a square. That glass gets cut up with nippers into little salsa or confetti sized pieces to use for pieces like these: