#glassblowing

Maybe this has interest for you

I don’t normally post my work on here because I don’t think it’s super tumblrcore but I’ve been doing a fair amount of production and I wanted to show it off.

Today I finally made it to a glassblowing workshop, which I think I mentioned on here that I wanted to do about a year and a half ago.

The studio's most affordable, beginner-friendly option is a group class where everyone makes the same basic piece, with some shape variations that you get to choose, along with the colors. Our project today was a cup!

Here are a few examples of other projects that can be done:

If you do a private class, you get to pick your own projects, so they have a bunch of samples sitting out.

Here's the studio! The person who was our main instructor today is standing over by the furnace; in the foreground slightly left of center is the workbench where you do the shaping. The rolling cart is where you add your colors, and behind it, to the right of the fan, is the workbench where you take your finished piece off the pipe.

Color bench!

I did the blues & white mixture on the lower right of the second picture, and some sprinkles of the solid bright green on the right of the top row of the first picture.

To start, the instructor demonstrated the project, then we took turns making our pieces. For your own piece, you do the shaping and coloring, and you do the actual blowing bit for someone else's.

The belly of the furnace full of molten glass, so your first step is rolling some up onto the pipe.

Then you take it over to the color cart and roll it around in your selected colors. You have to keep rotating the pipe the whole time, so the glob of glass stays vaguely round.

Then you put it back in the furnace and dip it back into the molten glass, and then rotate it around in there for a while so the colored glass chips melt into the clear base.

The instructor blows the initial bubble into the piece, because that part's kind of hard. You keep going back into the furnace with it a variable number of times, based on factors that the instructors presumably understand, and then when it's ready for blowing & shaping you take it over to the bench.

On the shaping bench, you use these things like big tongs to get it into a lightbulb shape.

While the instructor & assistant (the two ladies) make sure that you keep rotating the pipe and also keep the tongs in the right spot. One of your classmates gets to kneel down at the other end of the pipe and blow. When you're doing the shaping, you really feel how hot the glass and the business end of the pipe are; the blowing part is actually very easy. (It's probably harder if you are shaping & blowing, and if you don't have an expert telling you when to start and stop blowing.)

The assistant holds up these wooden cutting boards to help protect you from the heat & nudge your tongs into the correct position. Sometimes you have to go back to the furnace a time or two during this bit, if the glass starts to cool down.

Once your piece is shaped, you get to pop the bubble! This involves heating the top of the glass with a little blowtorch, while your classmate blows into the pipe. It's a very weird & interesting sensation when you're blowing and the glass pops.

Back into the furnace for a bit...

Then you use the tongs to shape and enlarge the opening.

It takes a while.

And the piece has to go back in the furnace a few times.

You have to keep rotating the pipe the whole time you're shaping, because the glass is goop, and if you stop spinning it, it'll start to slide off onto the floor.

Getting pretty nice now....

After you've done most of the shaping, the instructor puts it in the furnace one more time and does some finishing touches to fix wherever it came out uneven because you're a beginner.

She cuts it off the pipe with these big scissors--at this point, the glass has cooled enough that you can see the colors you picked, but it's still about a thousand degrees. It's solid enough that the scissors are just scoring it, rather than cutting the whole way through, so then you get to tap the pipe with the tongs to separate it.

Now your cup has a hole in the bottom! That is okay, because we have a big vat of molten glass handy.

The instructor gets some glass and blobs it on there.

Forbidden taffy

Then you get to flatten it with the spatula!

Then it goes into this special box (I don't know if it has a name) to cool slowly. On Monday, they'll mail our pieces to us! Mine is the one in the front, to the left of the red-and-white one. The one to the right of the red-and-white one is the one being made in most of the pictures. One person in the group chose to stick with plain clear glass, but do a little more complicated shaping to get a squared-off shape.

Overall, the class was very interesting! You are definitely getting a lot of help the whole time, and would need many more lessons before you're anywhere close to being able to work with glass on your own, but they do a good job of keeping you meaningfully involved with each step in the process.

My latest sculpture is done! I blew the glass myself, and made ferrofluid, and put this whole thing together. The little wooden stones have magnets in them to manipulate the ferrofluid.

Of course all I can see are the bits that I wanted to be different, but I'm trying to be proud of what I made. This was my first time ever blowing glass, and my first time making ferrofluid from scratch. Getting the holes to actually be the right size for the irregularly sized glass objects was SO HARD.

It's probably best seen in action: