OLPH Blows Glass Again

Entrance to Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center (Wheaton Village), Millville, NJ

21 December 2014

Dale and I had been wanting to go to Wheaton Village since I came home from Boston after my first glassblowing lesson.

A few weeks ago we tossed out the idea of going on a Friday afternoon.  I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it, but after working more than 12 hours on Monday, followed by three more long days, I only felt a little guilty leaving the lab halfway through the day.

It's an hour-plus drive to Millville.  On the way, I explained the definition of South Jersey:  south of wherever you are.

We got to Wheaton at 3:00 p.m., with two hours to see the museum, the glassblowing studio, and the stores, before the 5:00 p.m. close.  Dale checked the schedule and saw that the studio would have a demonstration in half an hour.  We headed over to look around.

We were the only tourists, and we were hesitant about walking around the work space, even though there was a ring around the outside and benches clearly designed for onlookers.  A tall artist approached us and asked if we were here for a make-your-own class.

Dale and I looked at each other.  I said, "We can do that?"  For a small fee, yes.

He summoned another artist, a shorter man with long, graying hair and a bandana.  "I have time for one," he said, and picked Dale.  His name was Joe.  "What color do you want?"

"Purple!"

He ushered her into the work area, behind a gate.  I stood outside, jealous, as Joe taught her how to make an ornament.

Dale is a bouncy person to begin with.  When she was finished, she was even bouncier.  I looked at Joe and asked if there was time for one more.  "No," he said, then, "Come on," and ushered me inside.

"What color?"

"Red," I said, as I put on a pair of safety glasses and pulled my hair back.

I didn't know that Dale was snapping pictures every ten seconds.

Here, I'm probably melting red powdered glass onto a bolus of clear glass at the end of the pipe.

The glass is red-hot as we roll it to move more of the glass away from the pipe.

Now I'm making the first air bubble inside.  The hotter the glass, the easier it is to make a bubble.  We put the glass into a mold to make ridges.

Now we're rolling it and pinching off the near end a little:

We repeated this several times, with me blowing into the pipe to make the bubble bigger and bigger each time.  Then we took it into a small room, where Joe sprayed an iridescent finish on it.  Next we removed it from the pipe and Joe made the finial for the top.  It went into an annealing oven, where it stayed until this afternoon, when Sean and Dale drove all the way the hell down to Millville to pick up the ornaments, do more Christmas shopping, become Wheaton Arts members, and drive all the way the hell back.  Me, I'd have said, "Ship it."

It'll look something like this:

When we got out of the studio we had less than an hour left, so we went to the museum store to remind ourselves that there's a world of difference between a guided ornament tutorial and mastery of molten glass:

This appears flat but it's three-dimensional.

*Sigh.*

While we had our lesson, the crafters were making glass snowmen.  They look better in a group than they do alone:

For Plain Jim, another Bad Santa.  This one appears to be extruding himself.

Dusk at Wheaton Village:

The entrance at sunset:

So now my head is all full of molten glass again.