Raw Glass Necklace, the only decent thing I've made from glass in weeks
18 October 2018
My slump didn't end when October began. Another lab session, another lab partner, and a handful of feeble attempts at bigger pieces netted me two heavy-bottomed, shallow bowls fit for a not very thirsty rabbit. I didn't even take pictures of what I put in the annealing oven. At lest the temperature in the studio had come down a little.
During a break I decided I should get a picture of something, so I took a couple of the block bucket where all the blocks return at the end of the day.
A lot of them are new cherry wood. The color leaks into the water and when we use them on hot glass they give off a sweet smell.
As we were leaving, one of the advanced students picked up a bowl that had been sitting on one of the tables. It was what our instructor calls a "floppy bowl." It was green outside and silver inside.
"That yours?" I asked him.
"Yeah. It's cracked."
"It's beautiful," I said.
He showed me the inside. Barely noticeable, running across the bottom, was a hairline fracture. He was about to throw it out when he stopped and said, "You want it?"
"YEAH!"
So now it's at home, with all the other glass, on top of the display case.
If you zoom in a lot you might see the crack, running from 2:00 to 8:00 across the bottom. Our instructor says the bowl will break eventually. If it does I'll glue it back together, unless it looks like art when it's in two pieces.
I arrived for class two days later feeling dejected and questioning my hobby choices. It was hot again too.
"We're gonna get you a good bowl tonight," my classmate said. We worked well together, our instructor staying back then jumping in to show us what we'd done wrong after we'd done it. I told my classmate that I wished he were my lab partner. I finished two pieces.
It was my classmate's turn to have a bad night. "I'm thinking too much," he said.
"I hear ya," I said.
He was about to toss his final piece of the night before he was finished. I stopped him because he'd scolded me last week for pitching one of mine halfway through. I coaxed him over to the break-off table so we could "put it away" in the annealing oven. It cracked in half when he knocked it off the punty.
"I'm kinda glad that happened," he said.
Our instructor decided to show us how to make a ribbon. He blew a bubble, gathered a lump of glass, and, turning the bubble with one hand, he drizzled the hot glass over the bubble with the other. The result was an organic look that I wanted to replicate.
I had a plan for my next lab session.
I was getting better at getting more glass and moving it off the pipe so that I had more to work with. I was getting better at shaping the edges too. But, invariably, I'd get to the last step, where I'd want to heat the piece one more time for some final shaping, and the whole thing would go floppy on me. What I put away was worse than what I'd made last week.
I still wanted to try the thread thing though. My lab partner had seen it done but had never done it herself. "Let's try it," I said, "and see what happens."
It took us a couple of passes to figure out how to drop the hot glass on, and how hot I needed to get it. What we made was a mess but I didn't care; it was just practice. When I made a bad punty and the piece shattered on the floor I didn't really care.
"Go again," she said, so we did, and this time we knew what we were doing. I had the floppy bottom problem again, though, and when I broke it off the punty part of the bottom came off with it. We put it in the annealer anyway.
I griped to one of the advanced students about my floppy bottom problem. "The bottoms are too thin," he said.
Argh! "I finally figured out how to make the bottoms thinner and now they're too thin!"
"You went too far in the other direction," he said.
When it was time to clean up for the night I noticed the leaves that had blown in from outside the open shop door.
At home I had another look at last week's bowls. As off-center as these were, I knew that what I'd made tonight wouldn't look this good.
I packed them away with the rest of my glass rejects.
Saturday's ride got rained out and instead I went to a meeting I hadn't been planning to attend. I took a beading project with me: the handful of raw glass chips that the assistant had let me take on the first night of class. The chips were rough and uneven, and so were the connections I made between them. I decided to call the necklace "Beginner." I wore it that night, and to work for a few days too.
When I retrieved Monday's bowls on Wednesday before class I was ready to throw them straight into the can of glass to be re-melted. I thought the better of it, though, because I wanted our instructor to see them so he could tell me how not to make the same mistake again. I also wanted to ask him how to make the threads less gloopy.
My classmate hadn't arrived, so I had time to wander over to the thermometer. For the first time it was below 80 degrees, even if only by a tenth of one.
I had time to photograph last week's screw-ups too. Here you can clearly see how the bowls collapsed.
This is the thread experiment. The bottom is half missing but it wasn't meant to be anything other than practice. I really dig this thread thing though.
Hanging out in the studio was a woman who my trainer at the gym had been hoping would find me. He trains her too, so we had something other than glass to talk about -- mostly our athletic injuries. I told her that our trainer calls me a "meathead" for lifting too heavy.
It became clear that my classmate wasn't going to show up. I was about to get a private lesson. It might not have been what our instructor wanted, but it was something I sorely needed.
I asked if I could dump Monday's pieces into the recycling bucket. "Nope," he said. He wants us to keep everything until the next critique night so that we can mark our progress. Sigh. These pieces would never make it to critique night.
His plan had been to show us some more embellishment techniques. He stuck with that, showing me a lily pad bottom and a dip gather, both of which he made look easy, neither of which I'm ready to attempt.
I asked if I could practice bowls some more. The first one went floppy on me at the last step again. I was putting it too far into the glory hole, not knowing that the ceramic door was plenty hot itself, and heating the punty and the bottom when I thought I was only heating the top.
When I screwed up a punty he had me make a handful of them until I got it right.
I had been standing on the wrong side of the punty rod when affixing it to the piece, using my left hand to guide the rod when, as a right-hander, I should have been manipulating it with my right.
I was pushing the punty onto the piece, indenting the bottom, rather than letting the hot glass melt onto the bottom without pushing it.
I was shaping the top with the jacks by coming in from above the piece. He told me to approach from the bottom. "This is so much easier!" I said, and got the piece opened and flared in one go.
I wanted to try a thread again, this time with more control. He told me to get more glass on the punty rod so that I'd have a bigger reservoir. That helped, as did holding the rod with the diamond shears in order to steer the glass onto the piece with more control.
I flubbed the punty a little, but he saved it and I opened the piece up into a bowl. I was excited that everything was working. He cautioned me not to be until it was in the annealing oven. It reminded me of the fellow on my Belmar century this summer, the one who kept on saying "this was great!" before the ride was over.
Well, when I knocked the piece off the punty I cracked the bottom. It was the second time tonight that this had happened. "You're hitting it too hard," he said. Once a meathead, always a meathead. He put it in the annealing oven anyway.
When it came time to sweep up there were more leaves than glass scraps in the studio. Our instructor rolled out a screen across the divide between the studio and the sagging blue picnic table.
"You learned a lot tonight," he said. "Put it all in your notebook."
So when I got home I did.
On Monday I want to make more thread bowls, good ones this time, ones I'll like enough not to melt down. I hope I can remember everything I need to remember.
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