Breaking China Plates for Mosaics~Tutorial

I've been asked how I break plates for creating my mosaics.  I hope you will find this helpful. Showing someone up close and personal is a lot easier than explaining through words. So bear with me on this! Keep these three things in mind...  
 
1.  Always wear safety glasses.

2.  Start off using a plate you aren't super crazy about.

3.  If it breaks in a place you aren't happy about remember these are mosaics and there really are no bad cuts.

                                   Breaking Plates to Save the Focal

I personally find this easier than saving the rim. You will need a pair of wheeled nippers. I bought mine on Ebay. By far the best brand is Leponnit. They are a little more expensive but worth it. I once cheaped out and bought well a cheap pair. They literally broke while cutting my third plate. I'm all for cheap, in fact my kids call me "The Cheap Mom" but there are times where you need to shell out the extra $ and this is one of them. OK back to plate breaking.

Leponnit Wheeled Nippers

                                                                             

Hold your nippers parallel to the inside of the rim and squeeze

                                                                         

                                                        

Continue holding the nippers parallel to the inside rim but not under the dreaded foot of the plate. We'll get to that little sucker in a minute.

                                                                                                        

Continue nipping all the way around.

                                                      

       Now you have a nice round focal but underneath is the foot of the plate which needs to be removed otherwise when you lay out your design the focal will be sitting too high. Remember the foot is not your friend! 

In order to get rid of the foot you need to place the nippers over the foot. If the foot is really high well good luck because sometimes the nippers won't open wide enough to get over it. Oh how I hate when this happens!

Just nip away the same way you did when removing the rim. Stay as close as you can to the foot in order to preserve as much of the focal as possible. You of course will be holding the plate with one hand and nipping with the other but since nobody wanted to play photographer over here one of my hands was busy holding the camera.

Here it is although a little blurry.

When it's all cut out there will be some jagged points. You can nip these away until you get it relatively smooth. If you are wondering how come some focals look so smooth well for me I take them to my glass grinder which I've had since my stained glass days which was eons ago. 

 

   

 Hope you find this helpful. I will do another tutorial on saving the rim a little later.