Tips for Cutting Fused Glass for Jewelry Making

One of the first lessons you will learn when making fused glass jewelry is how to cut it correctly. It's not that hard, but here a few tips to keep in mind:

To start cutting, you first score the glass with a glass cutter. Since you aren’t cutting all the way through the glass, you don’t need to use a ton of pressure when scoring.

When scoring glass, it must be scored from one end to the other. This means you can't start your design in the middle of the glass and cut it out like you would with a piece of paper.

Work safely, and when scoring the glass run the cutter away from you, not towards you. also wear safety gloves and protective eye wear.

After scoring the glass, position a tool called a runner over the score line. It is important to make sure the tool is lined up directly with the score.

Once the runner is lined up just right, give it a gentle squeeze to break the glass. Just as with scoring, not that much pressure is required.

Sometimes there may be small bits of glass that still need to be removed, especially if you are forming a glass piece into a specific shape. If so, this is when you use breakers, also referred to as breaking pliers.

None of these tools, cutter, runner, or breaker, requires much pressure, and in fact, if you try to overly "manhandle" a piece of glass with these, you will end up with just plain old broken glass versus a purposely cut piece.