Pictured here is my beloved grinding wheel. It's like spinning sandpaper that slowly wears away the glass with a rough surface. The white mess you see is the ground glass "sand" piling up and also water which acts as a lubricant to keep the machinery from overheating. Underneath, I've added a scrap of leather to slide the glass on as I gently rotate it across the face of the rotating wheel. Without that leather, the glass "sand" would happily scratch my pretty Heisey pieces and I'd lose that magnificent lustre in about two minutes flat.
I'm sure you can imagine the mess this sort of machine makes in the rest of my workshop too - spraying water and glass "sand" with abandon. Over the years I've developed a deep, cellular loathe for that mess, and so I built a taped-together "hood" or sorts to cover the workspace without interfering with my view. It might not be perfect or expensive, but it does the job just fine and it has made my life a lot easier to just accept the fact that working with stained glass will always be messy; it's best to let the mess live in one place after all and not stress about it.
That spatter gets everywhere too, and is especially annoying when it gets onto my glasses! Oh the sacrifices we artists must make for our work. But OH! how we are rewarded.
