In Which We Decide We Like Our Mistakes

15 February 2015

Rosemont-Ringoes Road is covered in hard-packed snow.  I'm driving 20 mph.  "This is beautiful," I tell Chris.  She doesn't appear to have an opinion.  "This is how I spend my weekends.  This is my reset button."  My body is in the car but my mind is on a bike with a pack of Hill Slugs.

Upper Creek Road is more passable than I thought it would be, but when I try to position my car in front of the glass studio, the front wheels spin on the ice.  "We'll dig it out later," Don says.  "Now's time to blow glass."

His daughter and her boyfriend are visiting.  She takes pictures while he handles the glass.  While Don takes him through the basics, I head to the house to use the bathroom.  At the entrance I'm greeted by Don's wife, Margaret, and by the only cat allowed indoors, Maurice.  I give him the head grab and flank rub that he fully deserves.

Back in the studio, Don is demonstrating a rondelle.  It's new to the boyfriend and a refresher for me and Chris.  What started as a bubble at the end of the pipe has been cut open.  Now watch it go from a bowl to a disc.  The blowing part is finished; the glass has been transferred from the pipe to a punty (a temporary piece of glass meant only to hold the larger piece in place):

 warming in the glory hole

 opening the top

widening the piece with compressed air 

 even wider

The glass goes back into the glory hole, where it is spun faster and faster.  The opening spreads out and the glass goes flat.  Out of the furnace, it is spun some more.

We're working with color today.  I decide I don't want to go first.  I want to see what's on offer.  Chris chooses a green and blue frit to roll her glass in.  Don pulls on the glass with a hooked pick and makes swirls.  When it's my turn, I tell him that I want to make the swirls.

He's doubtful that I can do it.  "I don't care if I mess up," I assure him.

"I'll do the first one," he says.

He lets me do the rest.  Sometimes I dig too deep.  Sometimes the glass has cooled too much.  I dig and pull and dig and pull. I'm having fun.  Finally, Don says, "I think we're done," and asks if I want the colors (blues and purples) to under go a little reduction (there are metals in it).  I have no idea what it's going to look like, but I go along with it.

He cranks up the heat in the furnace until flames shoot out and guides my vase (or whatever it is -- we really haven't discussed it) in.

It's a bouncing, baby, lumpy Erlenmeyer flask!  You can take the girl out of the lab...

Juniper appears from somewhere and decides that the water we soak our shaping tools in will do just fine.

This is one happy-footed love sponge.

Chris goes next, choosing blue-green frit.  It's going to be a bowl, and it's coming along quite well. Then, as she's spinning it in the glory hole, she hits the side of the furnace.  The glass slumps.  It's ruined.

"Don't throw it away," I beg.  "I'll keep it."  It's a collapsed mess of molten color, and I want it.

"Really?" Don asks, confused."

"Yep."  So he knocks it off the punty and puts it in the annealing oven with the rest of the day's work.

It's my turn again (it's back down to just me and Chris). I'd doodled my idea on a scrap of newspaper:  a rounded bowl with a single swirl of color.  We decide on a wine red, and that it should be a plate so that the entire swirl is visible.  And we're going to put a lip wrap on it:  we're going to wrap the outside edge in color.

I have no idea how we're going to do this until we're right up on it.

In a highly coordinated set of motions, I carry a punty with a little molten cone of color over to the bench and he grabs the end of it while spinning the clear glass.  The effect is a swirl of red on clear, like a bullet-shaped barber pole.

After that it's more blowing and shaping and opening the end, and then I'm standing at the glory hole, spinning the glass faster and faster as Don opens the door wider and wider and the edges start to melt and spin outward and I'm spinning faster and faster and the glass goes flat and the swirl is there faster and faster "This is so cool!" and

"Your'e done!" Don says, and takes it from me, spinning it out of the furnace until it cools enough to separate it from the punty.

Chris and I are left in the studio for lunch.  After I've eaten and given Juniper the love she so richly deserves, I pull out my pieces from yesterday so that I can get a few pictures.

This is the first piece I made.  It could be a vase or a candy bowl or a pen holder.

This started out as a bowl for the cats, but as we were making it, Don said it was coming out too well so I should keep it for myself.  That's fine, but I don't much care for the taste of cat food.

I'd wanted to play with pulling glass yesterday, so Don made a demo piece. He let me yank on the top so that I could get a sense of what the glass would do.  The result was something between a Coke bottle and a nightmare.

My last piece was practice for opening the top.  It's an amphora that, after a modest amount of leveling, just about stands on its own.  I see blu-tack in its future.

There was time for some random photography and a walk to the end of the driveway.

Damn.  This looked like the hill that it truly is when I took the pictures.

Down:

Up:

Across:

Driveway:

Juniper:

A web of spilled glass from the crucible:

Chris is creative and clever.  She'd looked around the studio for things to play with and had found a patterned mold meant for glass discs.  The pattern gets lost but a circle of air bubbles stays within her piece.

For her next piece she lays out a neat row of tiny stringer fragments and a pile of glass shards. The plate goes off-center at the last step, but we all like the oblong shape.

I don't like the shard effect (I've rarely liked the splotchy glass look), but playing off of Chris' idea, I go for stringers in random directions.

I goof at one point; Don hadsto correct it, and the result is that the glass is swirly.  Don't make me no never mind.

Here, he puts the punty on.  He'll break the pipe off next, leaving a hole for me to open, which I'm starting to really get into, even though I'm still having trouble keeping my piece centered.

I open the hole and carry the piece to the furnace.  It's bigger than the last one, and more difficult to keep centered.  I've got things under control.  I spin faster as Don opens the door wider to accommodate the expansion.

"I'm losing the center."

He steps in to help correct me and backs off again.  I try to spin faster but I can't keep up as the glass begins to slump.

Don takes over and pulls it out before it can hit the sides.  "I'm going to spin it like crazy," he says, but the best he can do is make a galaxy.

We all like it this way.

Our work is annealing overnight.  If I can get out to the studio tomorrow, I'll pick mine up.