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IntermediateWritten12 min

Designing around your offcuts

The scrap box is not leftovers. After a year it is the most interesting glass you own (small quantities of sheets you would never buy whole), and designing towards it rather than around it changes what you make.

Sort it so you can see it

An unsorted scrap box is functionally empty, because nobody digs through it. The sorting scheme matters less than having one.

  1. 1By color family, not by projectGreens with greens. You will be looking for a color, never for the remains of a particular panel.
  2. 2Flat, on edge, in shallow traysStacked scrap is invisible and scratches itself. On edge in a shallow box, you can flick through it like records.
  3. 3Set a floor and keep to itDecide the smallest piece worth keeping, and bin below it without agonising. For most work 2 inches (50 mm) square is a reasonable line. A box of unusable slivers is what stops people using the box.

Nesting a pattern onto a scrap

Cutting from a scrap is not like cutting from a sheet. You have no room to be wrong, and the breaks have nowhere to run out to.

room to breaknothing to gripscore stops in the glass
Pieces laid with a score's width between them, and each score running clear off an edge. The tight nest on the right leaves nothing to grip.
  • Leave about 1/4 inch (6 mm) between pattern pieces. That is the glass you will lose to the score and to gripping it.
  • Every score has to run off an edge. A score that starts or stops in the middle of the glass will not break cleanly, so plan the order of cuts, not just the positions.
  • Keep at least a thumb's width of glass to hold on either side of a break, or use running pliers.
  • Put the awkward piece on first. Fit the forgiving shapes around it, never the other way round.

Designing towards the box

The real shift is to stop designing a panel and then shopping for it. Start from what you have.

  • Pick the scraps first, lay them out, and let the shapes they can yield suggest the design. Small scraps want small pieces, which wants a busier pattern: geometric borders, mosaic backgrounds, scales, leaves, water.
  • Use one bought sheet as the field and the scrap box for everything that sits on it. The unity comes from the field, so the variety in the scrap stops reading as randomness.
  • Repeating a color three times across a panel makes it look chosen. Using it once makes it look like it was all you had.
  • Borders are the best scrap sink in the craft: many small pieces, low risk, and the repetition turns an odd assortment into a deliberate rhythm.

In Nessie, drawing the design over a photograph of the actual scraps is worth the five minutes it takes. It is much easier to commit to a layout when you can see the glass it will be cut from.

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