Finger Lakes Day One: Rain, Rain, Glass, Wine, and Rain

Corning Museum of Glass

30 September 2015

The rain arrived when we did, around 5:15 on Tuesday evening.  We're staying at a bed and breakfast in an historic house in Penn Yan, New York.  (It's short for Pennsylvania Yankee.  Whatever.)

There's nothing going on around here after dark, so we decided to watch Trevor Noah's first Daily Show episode.  The house wifi signal was weakish in our room, so I set up my phone as a wireless hotspot. Then we connected the laptop to our portable speaker via bluetooth.

I ate up about 1 GB of our shared 5 GB plan doing that, but it was worth it.

The owner of the house had an elaborate breakfast ready this morning.  She'd baked and iced gingerbread, and soaked whole wheat bread is a peach and cream concoction overnight in order to have French toast this morning.  I don't like French toast, but I appreciate the effort.  Her husband, who used to work for Starbucks (they're from Seattle), knows how to buy good coffee.  What she served was thick, dark, and roasted in Minneapolis.  I might have to be on an all caffeine diet this week.

Overnight, more than three inches of rain had come down.  It was still raining when we left for the hour-long drive to the Corning Museum of Glass.

"I reserve the right to stop the car and take pictures," I told Jack.

"I reserve the right to roll my eyes," he responded.

I only stopped once on the way:

The museum covers several buildings, and, confused, we walked into the wrong one first.  We'd gone into the Make Your Own Glass building.  For a small fee, one can sign up to make any number of pieces.  "There's not much hands-on," the cashier told me.  Humph.  That's hardly make your own then, is it?  I told Jack I'd think about it, and we crossed the lot to the main museum.

First, we watched a demonstration.  The last time I played with glass was seven months ago, but I remembered what some of the steps felt like.  This guy was handling a lot of glass compared to what I'd been allowed to work.

From there, we went into the most contemporary exhibit, in the new wing of the museum:

Twice, there were people on their cell phones, loudly talking business.  Even on vacation, there's no escaping work.  That's the new normal.  But can it be done a little more quietly please?

Next, the old stuff, and the Blaschka brothers:

Venetian:

A Czech serpent, which I had to send as a text to Dale:

Which then set me on a serpent search-and-text mission.

 

Who knew that reptiles and amphibians were a glass thing?  (Well, I did, kind of, because lampwork bead makers tend to be fond of them too.)

No glass exhibit is complete without Louis Comfort Tiffany:

Abstractions:

Paperweights in the Study Room:

Glass insects!  These are going on my desktop slideshow at work for sure.  The Blaschka nudibranchs have already grossed out one of my colleagues.

More contemporary glass:

Dale Chihuly, of course:

There's some eye-catching work in the shop too:

There was still time to catch a glassblowing class, so we went back to the studio.  I resigned myself to making another ornament.

Inside the work area, I handed my ticket to one of the glassblowers.  She showed me my choices.  I told her I'd done a little glassblowing, and she told me that the most hands-on piece I could make would be a flower. I didn't much like them, though, so I stuck with the ornament.

There were three of us in our group.  I refused to go first, having learned that lesson from the first time I blew glass in Boston, where I didn't know what or how much the instructor would be doing.  I wanted some time to remember the steps.  I watched as the glassblowers did everything  -- they gathered the glass, rolled it in frit, blew the initial bubble, and took it to the bench to round it out. The only thing the student did was blow into the pipe a few times.

To our left, two students were making flowers.  I watched as they got to pull and turn the glass.  I remembered the feel of grabbing and pulling molten glass. The flowers weren't looking so bad an option anymore.

It was my turn.  "Can I make a flower instead?"

"Sure!"

I chose a dark green stem, red petals, and black inner accents.  None of this is visible when the glass is hot.  It all looks orange.

I signaled to Jack to take pictures.  He took about a zillion on his phone.  

My paddle position wasn't quite right, and I'd forgotten the correct position to hold the tongs, but the glass was easier to work with than the softer stuff last winter, and a lot of the movements and feel came back to me.

 Now the fun part:  pull and turn and pull and turn:

Then we both pulled, elongating the stem until the flower drooped towards the floor.

Then I rolled the pipe, twisting the stem.  The completed flower went into the annealing oven before Jack could get a picture.  The piece will be in the mail before we leave for home.

We had time to visit one winery, McGregor Vineyards.  On the way, we had to slow down while a herd of cattle crossed the road.  They were finished by the time we got up to them.  Jack took the picture.  I was driving.

I did hop out of the car one more time:

There was no vineyard nor cellar tour here.  Apparently, most places only do tastings nowadays.  So I trudged around in the rain at the edge of the vineyard:

I  don't care about the wine.  I just want to photograph grapes.

Across the road is Keuka Lake:

In between describing the wines Jack was tasting, the woman attending to us (she said she does a little of everything at the winery) and I got talking about fracking.  I'd seen a few anti-fracking signs, which confused me, because New York State banned it a while ago.  The signs were relics.  Now, she said, the battle is against pipelines, and at the base of Seneca Lake, a plan to store liquified natural gas in an abandoned salt mine.  It would be transported in and out by truck and by rail.  The destination is overseas, where gas can be sold at a higher price.

Zoom in and read on:

Tomorrow the weather should be better. We'll see more wineries, and maybe do the walk up the Watkins Glen waterfalls.