Camel Glass Mosaic Bibelot Tutorial

This time of year is a good time to resolve to begin to widen your experiences. 

Today I did just that in trying something new by doing glass mosaics.  My daughter also made a glass piece and you can see it in the last photo.

All of the materials and tools were provided by Cheryl Smith Mosaics, who had come to our Girl Scout day camp to teach our troops how to create beautiful artwork in the sun.

Supplies
Glass cutters
Protective glasses
Protective gloves
Small paper plate
Colorful broken glass pieces
Diamond Glaze
Round glass ornament
Glitter
Wooden bamboo skewer
(I don't have a supply photo today because this project was done at stations.  I tried to take photos of all the items above.)

These were our choices for broken glass pieces.  There were also glass orbs, that have to be preordered from China a year in advance (!), but I didn't use any of those in my project. It took me awhile to decide what to make, but I final settled on creating a camel, my camp name, and two pyramids behind her.

I grabbed a small paper plate and picked out four colors for the camel, sky, ground, and pyramids.  I headed to the glass cutting table and put on protective glasses and gloves.



I was taught that the proper way to hold the cutters is with your left hand UNDER them to catch the two pieces.  I had to be reminded a couple of times about this since I'm used to placing my left hand OVER my wire cutters to protect from flying wire pieces.  I spent a little bit of time practicing on some spare parts before I felt confident enough to try the camel's legs, head and hump.

After my glass pieces were cut into the sizes I wanted, I headed over to another table where a wire drying rack were set up over an aluminum cooking pan.  I was given a glass flat ornament and a bottle of Diamond Glaze. I was instructed to cover the ornament with the glaze and then place a generous amount of glitter on top.

I then sent about creating my camel design over the glitter.  I had to make sure that none of the glass pieces were hanging over the edges of my round ornament.

After I was happy with the design, I added a generous layer of Diamond Glaze over it all to act as a grout.

I then placed a wooden skewer in the ornament hole to make sure the glaze does not glue over the hole.  My piece has to dry for 24 hours to make sure the glaze is set. Tomorrow I'll add ribbon though the hole to hang.

Here are some of the camper designed artwork.