DIY [glass etching]

After hearing how easy and inexpensive glass etching could be, my friend J and I decided to give it a try. For supplies, we needed etching cream, tape/contact paper/stencils/anything sticky, foam or paint brushes, and something glass (duh). We used glass things we had laying around, since it was only a practice round. I had a few matching glasses from a November beer tasting, and J used half-burned candles. You could also wash out old pasta sauce jars for a free practice piece.

Use an ubiquitous 40% coupon for Michael's if you're going to buy the etching cream in stores. You can sign up for their app, but it's just as easy to go to their weekly ad on a mobile phone and pull up a coupon image while in store. Current coupons include 50% a regular priced item and 25% off your entire purchase, good through Dec 22nd.

First step, which we of course forgot about, is washing your glass piece, potentially with a little hydrogen peroxide or rubbing alcohol to make sure it's completely oil-free. Dry thoroughly. Next, use your sticky stuff to make a design. It would be far more detailed if we used contact paper and an X-acto Knife, but we used what we had and what we had was hot pink duct tape. I cut strips and haphazardly applied them to the glasses, like so.

Once the glasses were ready, we applied the etching cream. Some other etching creams, like Armour Etch, are incredible strong, which means two things: they work very quickly and they are dangerous. They could give you light results in just a few minutes and deep etching in 10, but you also need to be very careful about getting it on your things, including hands. Martha Stewart's etching cream (which was the only one J could find at Michael's), on the other hand, was very weak. In fact, when we washed it off after the recommended amount of time, we couldn't really see much of anything. We tried again, dabbing it on super thick and leaving it in place for half an hour, and that seemed to do the trick. It's not a problem necessarily, you just have to be patient...not my strong suit. I think this would be safe to do with supervise-able and semi-mature children/young teens, which I wouldn't say with Armour Etch.

It's hard to see in these pictures, but hopefully you get the idea. I also wonder if Martha Stewart etching cream gave us the frosted, even look we achieved. When I compare our results to those I shared from A Beautiful Mess, they really don't look that similar. I like the rustic, more aggressive look of their etched glass, but would probably prefer the evenness of Martha's brand for monogramming and classier pieces. Your opinions?