Do you like to give your home interior a bit of personal flair? You’re not the only one! Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to customize your home so that every corner of it feels like you. Keystone Home Products wants to address one really great DIY technique that’s easy to do and extremely underutilized: glass etching. We’ll briefly cover how you can use glass etching to customize your glass shower enclosure.
What Is Glass Etching?
It may sound dangerous or difficult, but glass etching is actually very easy. What is it? Well, have you ever seen a piece of glass – a wine glass, a candle holder, an old glass lamp shade, etc. – with an opaque design on it? This design is usually white, but it’s not something applied to the surface, like paint. This is glass etching. The glass is transformed to be opaque in only select areas, allowing you to paint or stencil on any design you want.
How Is It Done?
Glass etching may sound like something you have to do with special tools or a laser, but it’s not. It’s much simpler than that. The opaque design added to any piece of glass is done by applying acid to it. The acid eats through the surface of the glass, creating such consistent damage to it that it simply loses its transparency.
Applying acid to something sounds dangerous, right? Well, not much more than most other DIY projects, or putting in a load of laundry with some bleach. The acid used for glass etching is sold in hardware or crafting stores. It comes in the form of a cream or paste.
If you intend to do some glass etching, you’ll want to look up a detailed guide. However, the general process involves creating a template with a sheet of vinyl, temporarily adhering it to the surface of the glass, applying your glass etching solution to the exposed part of the glass, giving it some time to work its magic, then cleaning it all off. Left behind is a beautiful, opaque design on your glass.
Using Glass Etching to Customize Your Shower Enclosure
Glass etching is most commonly used to customize small pieces of kitchenware, such as champagne glasses. This is often done for printing dates or names on things to create memory pieces for things like wedding dates. However, glass etching is a versatile craft and can be used for many more things than people frequently use it for. For example, you could use it to add a custom design to your shower enclosure.
Some great ideas are to:
- Add a band of growing grass and blooming flowers to the bottom of the enclosure
- Outline the edges of the entire enclosure with blooming vines and leaves
- Create a simple, geometric pattern to give a lightweight framing effect to the enclosure
- Add some words that inspire you – a favorite poem, quote, or mantra
Revitalize or Start with Fresh Glass
When you customize your glass shower enclosure with glass etching, you have two ways to go about it. If you have an old shower enclosure, you can use glass etching to bring it back to life. Applying glass etching specifically to areas with topical impurities or damage might even erase the imperfections entirely. However, if you’d like a blank canvas to work from, you can also get a new, glass shower enclosure from Keystone Home Products in Toronto.
