Tip of the Day: Spirals on Stained Glass Gazing Balls

I have done spirals by eye on some balls, only to find about half way through that the spirals were uneven. That was very frustrating because I had to pry off all that glued down glass. I did not want to draw my spiral on the ball, because if I was using translucent glass the lines could show through the glass if it crossed over the line. I finally figured out a way to create the spiral pattern on the ball that could be removed a little at a time as I glued the glass down. I used a strip of bias tape(a sewing notion) and taped it to the ball using a low tack artist's tape. Because the cloth strip is cut on the bias, it stretches and curves, making it easy to follow the curve of the ball. In some places I had to overlap sections of the bias tape and place a strip of artist's tape across the overlap to get the bias tape to lay against the ball as I wanted it to do.

Once the bias strip was taped to the ball, I could step back from the ball and check my design. If necessary, I could adjust any area that did not look right. After that, I laid short overlapping strips of 1/4 inch wide artist tape along each side of the bias tape. Then I removed the bias tape. What was left was a double spiral of tape around the ball that I could use as guidelines for gluing the glass. Since the tape was in short strips, I could work a small section, and remove the tape as I went along, leaving the rest of the guidelines intact.

One additional note, the edge of the low tack tape was not easy to grab with tweezers. I found that the pointed end of a bamboo skewer worked really well to lift up the edge of the tape. Once I had an edge up, it was easy to grab it with tweezers and pull it off.