Enamel White with Gold Ruby Extra Feather
14 March 2020
I: Release from Purgatory
The days are finally getting longer. It's mid-February, and at 5:11 p.m. the sun hits the glass on my office window sill just right.
If all goes well during the first half of class tomorrow, I think I'll dig out some color. Extra won't be there, so Sleepless and I will have more time.
I spend way too long on my first vase, a little one, based on the cone shape I like to make. Every time I pull the top I knock it off center. I get it back on center and give up. Sleepless likes it more than I do. I can pretty much say that about every piece I've made this semester.
Next I go for a long neck, pulling it and cutting it. I like the shape well enough. If only I could work the glass thinner. I never blow it out enough.
When it's my turn again I pour out some copper ruby light frit. This is a striking color, which means it won't turn red (or maroon, or purple, depending on the heat it sees) until it's annealed. While I'm working it, though, it's completely transparent. So I'm working with color but working in clear at the same time. I'm easing myself out of purgatory.
I try a vase, going light with the jacks around the neck. I make an aventurine old gold cat, and later a brilliant yellow one. Sleepless springs herself from purgatory too, with a cranberry pink goblet.
Today I'm in an extra session, Thursday afternoon, with Low Key. We both start off using our blow hoses, both decide that they're too distracting, and both cast them aside to assist each other instead.
While she's setting up her color, I take Tuesday's pieces to the picnic table, the top now a light beige, which is better for pictures.
I always have to grind stuff down. It's always off-center. And I'm noticing another problem too, one that's plagued me for a year now. Somewhere along the line, while the piece is on the punty, I think, one side goes straight while the other stays curved. I get a chimera, a vessel that looks good from one side at a time only.
The copper ruby light vase lists so badly that I discard it. I'll try again today.
The squat vase I spent so much time on came out better than I thought it would.
It's off-center too, though.
The flask is a curvy version of laboratory glassware.
The cat is a cat.
The cat is a tiny cat.
I want to lick cranberry pink.
I'm moving more slowly and carefully today than I do on Tuesday nights. Today there's no hurry. Our classmates are a pair of beginners who work well together.
This time I get the bottom shape the way I want it, and a second jack line in that I can use to flare the top. The proportions are off, but I think I'm getting closer to what I want.
I move it to deep in the annealer. It's already turning color. And I can already see that it's off-center too.
I try again with a color I've neglected. It's called light reseda green. It's transparent though, which lets me see what I'm doing.
This one is centered. I work the neck gently. Not until I'm ready to put it away do I realize I've come very close to the shape I've been after all this time. "Yeah yeah yeah!" I exclaim. "Let's put it away!"
We clean up at 5:00 and hang out until our class starts at 6:00. Tall Vase ends up being my partner when my turn rolls around. He helps me with a hyacinth vase. The color is transparent but dark, so I have less of an idea of the thickness. It turns out pretty well, better than the others from earlier today.
I should mention that most colors don't look like the colors they are while they're hot.
Sleepless had come in at the beginning of class to retrieve her two cranberry pink goblets. Like me, she views all of her work with disgust. She's entitled to her opinion, of course; she's wrong, though. When I told her how much I liked one of the goblets, she had handed it to me. I'd seen her go into the hallway with the other goblet and shot glass. Not until later did I realize she'd thrown them away. Extra had retrieved them to grind into frit.
I'm not grinding her goblet to frit. I'm putting it on the display case, with the ornament she gave me in December, next to the other pieces by people from our class. I text her a picture for good measure.
II: Silly Vases
I have to grind things down, of course, to get them to resemble being on-center. I'm sweating and shivering at the same time. I'm hungry. My hand slips and the vase tips over, putting a scar on the clear glass.
Not to worry: there's always the sand-blaster. The metal shop has installed a new one. The old one had a trigger; this one is operated with a foot pedal. I still have my mountain bike shoes and booties on. My foot barely fits into the protective box around the pedal. The nozzle has a kick to it that the old one didn't have. But lordy, this one is fast and even. I coat the vessel in about two minutes, which is easily half the time it would have taken me before.
Then I go outside for pictures.
Dang. Nope. I'll keep it for now.
Milk bottle!
Getting there!
I'm starting to think I don't like aventurine old gold on ornaments. I snap a picture and the wind blows, sending the ornament off the table and onto the cement, where the hook snaps off. (After fixing it at home I decide it's not worth saving. It goes into the trash.)
I need to use this green more often.
It's Tuesday again. I'm going to try threading. I ask Thread Sherpa to guide me. I want to bring the thread this time; that's the difficult part.
First, though, I warm up by laying down white frit and picking up scrap threads. The vase turns out squat with no curve at the neck.
When my turn rolls around again, Thread Sherpa is also working, so All The Glass turns the pipe for me while I bring the thread. It comes off too thin. I work it anyway, using Thread Sherpa's glove and tool at the glory hole, Sleepless shielding me from the heat. I only pull towards me.
I'm going to try for a vase again. There's more glass on this piece than I've worked with all semester. The threading looks good enough that I don't want to risk ruining the piece by playing with the neck too much. This took too long to set up to see it all go to hell.
It ends up pretty goofy-looking. All The Glass says, "You have too much glass on top." When All The Glass says you've got too much glass, best believe him. Next time.
So now I have two silly vases in the annealer. They look like wrapped hard candy.
By the end of the evening there's almost no glass left in the furnace. I'm trying to make a few quick cats with the leftover white and violet frit. I pick up the white frit then iris violet on the next gather. The glass is feeling a little gummy, as if it's not as hot as it should be when it comes out of the furnace. Sleepless is using the furnace heat to make the bit for the tail. Even the heat is weird now, and the bit falls in on itself. "Bring it anyway," I tell her. It works out well. The cat has a big, fat tail. I hit it with the flame to seal the end and the glass starts to reduce. I'd forgotten that it would. I flame the whole cat, focusing on some spots more than others. It'll come out partially reduced.
I have time for one more cat. I gather some white frit on the core bubble and go in for a second gather. The glass is truly gummy now, and full of bubbles. The furnace heat isn't what I'm used to, and I have trouble controlling the glass. The cat comes out off-kilter, it's small head leaning backwards in an un-catlike pose.
Thursday comes around and I gather them all inside for a photo shoot.
Silly vase!
The more I look at this the less I like it.
Empty furnace cats.
Oh, right! I forgot that I used Sleepless' pink again for an ornament.
I combined her pink and my violet for this one. There had been five minutes left in class. I told her I could make an ornament in five minutes, and I did. Look at the hook; it shows.
I'd taken an extra Wednesday slot, too, to blow glass with Sage again. I have to wait until Saturday to see how those pieces came out.
I'd made some ornaments at the end. She had a bag of frit she'd found at the bottom of her collection and had been using it. She didn't know what it would look like and had been pairing it with other colors. I rolled it onto clear glass for an ornament, then made a fuchsia one and a yellow one.
I had also tried aventurine old gold again. "I'm not sure I like this color," I told Sage. "It's ugly on ornaments and dark on my cats. I'm going to try it again. I don't care about the shape. I just want to see what it looks like stretched out."
I ought to have cared about the shape. I like the shape about as much as I like the color.
I'd tried a scrap thread vase with a pulled neck. Once again I cannot keep the top on center, no matter how much hanging I do. The threads hide some of the unevenness.
So, back to Thursday, the day I took the photos of the silly vases. I want to try aventurine old gold again, this time caring about the shape.
First, though, I need to ask Our Instructor some questions. I tell him about my one-flat-one-curved-side problem and how I can't keep anything centered.
"Your punty is too hot," he says. "Your piece is moving around."
Tonight I keep the punty out of the heat, and voila! My piece is symmetrical and centered!
So, of course, I have to go ruin it by slipping on the grinder when I'm trying to sand off the leftover punty.
At home I cover it with clear nail polish. The vase isn't going anywhere anyway. With the frit pattern, I can see that the top is thicker than the bottom. It's a groovy effect, but it shows my lack of skill. I like the color a little better now, but I'm still not thrilled.
At home I line them all up. Our mid-term critique is a few weeks away. What have I got to show for half a semester of work?
That I can center a piece now? That's something I should have learned in my first semester.
III: Oh My God Yeah Fuck It
I'm in a horrible mood. I've been crabby all day. One would think I'm too old for PMS. One would be wrong. I'm riding this bad mood all the way to class, it seems.
I ask Thread Sherpa to guide me again. This time I've made the thread ahead of time and have it resting in the pipe warmer. When my turn comes up, I roll my first gather in white frit and blow a core bubble. "It's too big," Thread Sherpa says.
"Should I start over?"
"Nah. Keep going." He takes the thread I'd left in the pipe warmer so that he can get it soupy hot. The tip cracks off instead. So much for advance planning. He hands me what's left of the thread and I do my best to put it on the pipe while Sleepless spins it for me.
The thread goes on invisibly thin. I feather it anyway, but the core glass is too hot and it stretches out of control before I can get more air into it. I wrestle it back onto center, laying down a football field of f-bombs.
I'm left with a tall cylinder, with barely visible threads on one end and the white frit speckling out into clear glass on the other. It's horrific.
"I love it!" Sleepless says. "I love how the feathers twist."
"It's not supposed to twist," I grumble. "It's fucked."
"Fucking waste of time," I say as I open it up.
I keep going anyway and put away one of the taller pieces I've ever made. At least it's on center.
I already know that I'm giving it to Sleepless if it survives the annealer.
From a failed drop vase, I saved a solid rod of purple-coated clear glass last semester. Now I cut it into thin discs and warm them on the hotplate. I want to pick them up in a random pattern and see if I can get a smattering of little circles.
I have time left in this round so I crank up the heat on the hotplate. It's not enough to get through the discs; they shatter and scatter when I try to roll them onto my glass. I go with what I have, watching the discs turn into distorted Os on the white background.
What the hell; I'll marver and twist. I need to practice that anyway. Now the purple pattern is a random mess of swirls. I like how they look, so I don't open the vessel too much. I'm running out of time anyway.
That's the way it's gone on Tuesday nights this semester. I try to keep to the 40-minute time limit and always go over to 45 or 50. I go second at the far bench; the person who goes before me usually takes at least 50 minutes. When Sleepless gets her turn, I try to make sure she gets to go over time too. Meanwhile, Thread Sherpa and All The Glass don't want to use our bench. I don't track their time. I get the sense they don't take as much time as we do. We all get a chance to go twice, but Sleepless, being last in the rotation, always gets shafted. I think I noticed it before she did. I think my timekeeping pisses people off.
When I get my second turn I try for threading again. There seems to be not enough resistance in the pipe when I blow my core bubble. I gather white frit again and use a piece of black rod that Thread Sherpa gave me. The threading goes better this time when I bring it to the pipe. The feathering, only towards me, because pulling away is something I'm not ready for, goes well.
Now we need to get air into the glass.
Nothing.
There's almost no resistance when Sleepless blows, yet the core bubble doesn't move. We try heating the glass some more, because the bubble is, by necessity, pretty cold.
Nothing.
I try.
Nothing.
All The Glass comes over. "There's a hole in the pipe," he says, and points to a split in the metal a few inches away from the glass. So that's why this pipe was in the scrap bucket instead of with the others. It's my fault entirely; I'd blown through it, didn't find a clog, and didn't see the gap, which has grown with the heat of the glass.
We try to cover the hole with hot glass. That doesn't work either. All The Glass suggests I break off what I have and put a foot on it.
I consider it while I reheat the glass, and then it dawns on me that the solution is obvious.
Make a cat. Duh.
I can't shape the body, but I can get it hot enough to make a head and ears while Sleepless prepares a clear gather for the tail. It takes some doing to knock it off the pipe; it's a solid mass.
"I think this is the best cat you've ever made!" Extra says. Potter, who has come in to watch us, agrees. I don't agree, at least not yet. I'll have to see how it looks when it comes out.
I'm in no better mood at 9:00 p.m. than I was at 9:00 a.m.
On Thursday I'm feeling more normal. I take the pieces outside for their photo shoot.
I'm keeping this one. The top is slightly off-center, but only visibly so if one looks straight down at it.
This one is called "Oh My God Yeah Fuck It" after a song of the same name. I ain't got time for this. Fuck this. Fuck everything.
Oh, look. Threads.
Here's the broken-pipe kitty.
Back in the classroom, we sign up for slots for the night. I assist a beginner who scares me. He's a class clown and pretty much does everything wrong, yet winds up with decent work. I watch him mangle a mold and come away with a bowl.
In the warmer I have a slice of cherry red rod. I've used this color a handful of times and have kept every piece from it. I'm going to try another vase, with help from Classmate's Partner, who knows how to pull necks and open them up.
He gives me a suggestion that makes all the difference in the world. The piece is symmetrical, on center, and has the neck shape I've been after for a while. The top is still the same thick thing I've been making all semester. Someday I'll figure out how to make it thinner without having to spend ten minutes pulling and cutting. Tonight isn't the night to be taking up that much time.
I like what we put away.
In the annealer it's a deep purple-brown.
Our mid-semester critique is in a week. I tell Our Instructor that I'm not going to have anything spectacular. I've spent the semester trying to fix my jack lines, thick tops, thin bottoms, and centering, while working on a vase shape. "We'll see your progress," he assures me, and adds that even the best composers spent hours a day practicing scales.
At home I put Tuesday's swirly vase on the window sill and drop a little LED light into it.
I move the light into the silly scrap vase,
and then into Dork Dork Dork.
Whoa! I'm going to have to bring this little bugger to crit now.
Once again I don't want to wait until Tuesday to see how Thursday's vase came out. Late Saturday afternoon I drive over to pick it up.
Sage nods as I pull it out of the annealer.
Ta-da! Cherry red never fails.
Now I have to decide what to bring to crit on Thursday. Slowly, pieces get culled from the window sill.
I have a lot of rods to set up on Tuesday, so I get there early. Extra offers me the chance to go first, but I have to wait for the warming oven to get up to temperature.
LT1 comes over to me. "No class Saturday."
"What?"
"The school is shutting down until March 23."
Covid-19.
I text Alchemy right away.
Now it's a mad rush to make something, anything, because none of us believes that we'll only be closed for a week. Rutgers and Princeton Universities have shuttered, sending the students home to work online. All around us, businesses are telling their employees to work remotely. Meetings and conferences are being canceled. Hand-washing instructions are going up all over the building I work in. Our custodian is sanitizing door knobs twice each day. How we're still here, mouths on pipes, is a wonder.
LT1 is sanitizing the mouthpieces. I have a baggie of peroxide wipes from work. I run them over the pipes a few times during our class period.
I try threading again, once more asking Thread Sherpa to guide me when I bring the bit. I use a white rod for the core bubble and gold ruby extra for the bit, which Sleepless starts and I finish, handing her the pipe to turn on the sawhorse. I bring the bit, and it seems to start good and thick. That only lasts a few rotations, though, before it thins out again. Damn.
At the glory hole, I use the longest-handled tool we have to pull towards me, Sleepless shielding me from the heat with each pull. I try for a reverse pull, but the tool brings me too close to the glory hole for comfort. We go back to the bench, which means, since our bench is on the other side of the room, that I lose a lot of heat just walking over.
I manage to get four reverse pulls in, not quite to the bottom, but close enough. Three out of four are decent. It's a start.
As I get the glass back into a workable shape, with Sleepless giving me air, Thread Sherpa appears. "Where was I?" he asked. I hadn't even noticed his absence. I shrug and keep on working the piece.
"You should have pulled all the way to the bottom," he says. Too late for that. "What shape are you making?"
"Dunno."
" A vase?" He thinks that if I do a long shape then the gap won't matter.
"Maybe," I tell him. "A straight shape." If it curves outwards then the pattern will be on the underside. I know better than that.
In the end I make something closer to a cup than a vase. It took me so long to set up and then make the thread that there's no time to get fancy. "Take all the fucking time you want," Sleepless says.
While I'm assisting Sleepless, Thread Sherpa asks me if I'm going to thread again tonight. "Probably not," I tell him. "That one took me an hour. There's no time."
I'm making sure Sleepless gets an hour too. "Take all the fucking time you want!"
I take the leftover rod slices out of the annealer and pour some iris blue frit into a holder. In my red vase elation last week, I'd emailed Plain Jim a picture, telling him that purgatory appears to have paid off. "Can you do it in blue?" he asked.
"More or less in any color. More or less."
So I'm trying to make a blue vase just like the red one. I squeeze too hard with the round jacks when I'm making the neck. The piece goes oblong and I can't figure out how to get it back to round.
"It's oblong," I complain to Sleepless. "But it symmetrically oblong." So I go with it, pulling the neck and, as a final gesture, tilting part of the lip down in a suggestion of a spout.
"Your turn," I tell Sleepless.
"Nah. I'm done for the night."
So I use up the rest of the frit I have out and make a little cup.
"I have a title for my next blog post," I tell Sleepless. "Invisible."
"Because we're invisible?"
"That, and I'm fixing a bunch of mistakes nobody can see."
Everyone is finished. We clean up. LT1 comes back in to refill the furnace for tomorrow's sessions. She turns the glory hole off.
I'm sad. I try to console myself that it's only a week off.
IV: A Semester Cut Short
The text arrives at 5:30 on Thursday as I'm driving to class. I can't read it until ten minutes later.
The college will be closed starting Friday and won't reopen until April 30. All classes will be online until then.
How does one blow glass online?
The dean of the arts program comes in to talk to us as we sit with our midterm glass spread out in front of us. He'll do his best to accommodate us in April. There's talk of extending class hours to Fridays and Sundays in an attempt to squeeze six weeks of missed time into four. There's talk of partial refunds.
I feel weird, not quite here, not quite anywhere. We have no control other than to distance ourselves from everyone and everything. And wash our hands.
Nearly everyone else has been making vases too. I was unaware of this. We're all making different shapes from each other, though. Compared to theirs, mine are small and controlled, but thick. Glass Ninja has large, thin, flowing vases. Grace has tiny ones, none taller than a few inches. Tall Vase has balloons. Extra has approximations of Erlenmeyer flasks of various sizes. One of the other students has long, thick, bud vases.
I stumble my way through my presentation. I explain all the errors that I ought to have fixed in my first semester. I explain that I want to play with color but I've been focused on vases and learning how to thread. "Bringing the thread is the hard part. I'm having trouble with it.
I end by saying, "If a semester has to be cut short, let it be this one. I haven't been having fun."
Our Instructor assures me that threading is a difficult task and that it takes a long time to perfect.
I point out how much glass the silly threaded vase has on top. "When All The Glass says there's too much glass on top, best listen." Our Instructor counters, "I've seen that exact thing for sale at [I forget where]."
I thought that Tuesday's feathering was a failure, but apparently it isn't.
We get into a discussion about the finer points of feathering, Thread Sherpa describing his method and Glass Ninja describing his. They're completely opposite. You're not helping, guys.
Extra repeats that the broken-pipe kitty is the best cat I've made so far. Other people like it too. So I guess it's a keeper. I might even try again, with orange inside, and a little air, and black threads, a tiger.
As we move on to other tables, we see other students who have been working in clear to get shapes down. "It's like playing scales," Our Instructor says. Gee, where have I heard that before?
I'm too weirded out to think straight. At the end of the night, it's me, Alchemy, and Our Instructor, talking about UV sterilization and viral half-lives on various surfaces (I happen to have that in an email). Our Instructor is going to build a UV light box to cover the mouthpieces of the blowpipes while they're on the warmer.
I've forgotten to take pictures of Tuesday's work in the good light of the classroom. The bedroom pillow will have to do.
In blue, more or less:
Feathers.
I put everything back on the window sill. My glass is in suspended animation. Until we know if and when we'll work again, I can't move anything or give away anything or throw away anything. I'm paralyzed.
I drop a multi-color LED light into the feathered vase.
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