Thursday, January 18, 2007

Laying Your Glass on the Stepping Stone Pattern

Take the pattern/template which you trimmed to fit the mold. Lay it on a flat surface and begin to place your glass pieces on the design with the right side up and facing you as you work. Make sure all your numbers match. Again, you can use a touch of glue stick to hold the pieces in place.

You can now clean the numbers off the glass if you’d like. This is not super critical at this point because you can always clean them up later after the stone is poured.

When you have everything in place, cut a piece of resist or contact paper that is slightly larger than the size of the mold. Peel off the back to expose the sticky side and press it down smoothly and very firmly on top of the glass. Then trim away the excess resist so that it is the same size and shape as the template/frame. At this point, you can remove your paper template and put it aside. You can double check the fit of the resist and glass by picking up the resist, with the glass firmly adhered and flip it over, resist side down into the mold. Try to make the edges of the resist conform as closely as possible to the shape of the mold. Even though the resist or contact paper is very thin, it will leave a line in your concrete. The idea is to get that line as close to the edge of the stone as possible so it is virtually unnoticeable. If your glass pattern fits right up to the edge of the mold, you’ll never see the line. You can use your Exacto knife to trim the resist right along the edge of the glass. If you choose a pattern that has open concrete work as a part of the design, it is more important to match the shape of the mold as closely as possible.

Remove the glass with resist from the mold. Clean the wrong side of the glass (which is still exposed) very thoroughly, and then set it aside.