Glass Block Temple

A friend of mine asked me if I would help her make a gift for a friend of hers. She wanted to do an LDS temple on each side, as well as some wording. I thought it would be a pretty fast and easy thing! It wasn’t and so I thought I’d tell you some of the things I learned.

The first thing was finding the pictures and I had her do that so she got the views she wanted.

Then deciding on the fonts and placement of the wording was the next thing, Again I was letting her decide on the fonts. We gave her too many options and so this took longer! The placement is something I worked on later and it had it’s own challenges. The font she chose had the capital letters spaced differently than the lower case and she wanted those moved. Then to get it centered in the temple shape made it so I had to separate some of the lines.

Then I cut it out of shiny, black vinyl. It cut ok but by the time we sized it to the block the parts were so small that weeding was a challenge! I had to get a magnifying glass out to get it done!

When I finally was ready to put it on the glass I ran into more problems. I don’t know if it was because the vinyl was older or if it was the way I was applying it but I ended up with bubbles everywhere that wouldn’t come out. So I had to start over with the cutting and weeding and applying. I looked online to see if I was doing something wrong. I even contacted Cricut to see if they could tell me what to do. They couldn’t. So I ended up having Steve hold the vinyl up off the glass while I worked it down about 1/8″at a time. I still had bubbles but not near as many.

Now it has been a long time since I did one and the kicker to all this is that I put the design on so that the opening was on the bottom! After all the problems we left it that way!

Next was the filling and ribbon and attaching the battery packs.

The filling I left up to my friend. Here are a couple of pictures of what she tried. She ended up liking the clear stones the best but it makes the block very, very heavy.

The ribbon was just a matter of finding one she liked and then the ribbon was easy but attaching the 2 battery packs was a bit of a challenge because she didn’t want the black to show. We ended up covering 2 ends with ribbon and making the bow tight enough to hold them in place.