doodlebugcreates

When I saw the event ad on Facebook, I couldn’t help it. I’ve always wanted to do glass blowing. So I jumped on the link, and paid the registration fee lickity split.

Nope – the facility also holds a used record sale on the first Saturday of the month, and the teachers were upstairs holding a last minute staff meeting. The record sale information I’ve definitely filed away for a future date.

My instructor – call me “Swede” – came out, and walked me through a quick tour of the studio/classroom space. He gave a high level overview of the process, and explained that we would be making a bowl today.

We started with a clear blob of glass that he picked up out of this molten inferno of an oven. They had the colors laid out on a table by color and category, it was a pretty rainbow of options and I almost had a panic attack trying to decide. Finally, I decided on rainbow over white. Because why not?

Rule 1: Keep it spinning

The first thing you learn, is that hot glass is basically a liquid and you have to keep the rod spinning or your project will start to drop and drip everywhere and look relatively like a strange blob. But if you keep twirling the rod around gravity will do all of the hard work for you.

We dumped the colors I had chosen into two bins, and then started tapping the glass into the color (in reality, the color is broken bits of already colored glass) and then stuck the stick into the glory hole (super hot furnace) to allow the materials to kind of melt into each other.

We used a couple of different wooden forms that had to keep being dipped into a bucket of water to shape the blob into a slightly more rounded shape and then I blew into the pipe until Swede told me to stop.

He took the bubble and made a few more adjustments, smoothing out any weird shaping. And then he told me to use the pipe to suck out all the air I could until he said stop. Which seems counter productive, until you see the finished product – a bowl that’s double layered with lots of super cool swirls in it.

Waiting forever…

I can be a very impatient person, and the hardest part of this process was to load the bowl into the annealer and leave it there…

Since the glass was incredibly hot, and in a fragile state, they use the annealer as a way to control how fast the items cool down, which helps stabilize the piece and lower the risk of cracking (or worse) as it returns to room temperature.

Englewood Arts has several different glass blowing learning opportunities (as well as classes in many other mediums) – including date night packages. I think I’m going to try to schedule one of those in the near future with the Mister.