Try again. Fail again. Fail better
-- Samuel Beckett
1/24/19
Glassblowing II
VAFA-148
Spring 2019
Section N84
01/24/2019 to 05/17/2019
OMG somebody please also sign up for Monday night lab what if I get a beginner I’m not good enough to teach a beginner what if nobody signs up if both of us need help will the people at the advanced bench help us hey I can make a fuchsia cat will I be able to show a beginner how to make a thread without an advanced partner I’m never going to improve BITCH SHUT UP!
At least I recognize everyone here.
There's no glass in the furnace yet. We mill about with our coats on, picking our lab slots and signing our release forms. None of us knows our student ID number. Tuesday night is full up. Monday night has two slots open out of four. I get my name in.
We give the forms to our instructor, who signs them, takes his copy, and gives our copy back. He gets to mine. "Your handwriting is ridiculously anal," he says, holding the form out, already looking at the next one.
"Great. He's starting already."
That gets a laugh. I relax a little.
There's nothing else to do, so we leave. Nobody else has chosen Monday night.
I lie in bed working out how to train a beginner to make a punty and bring a bit.
1/28/19
My eagerness from last semester has carried over to this one enough to get on the text list. There's an empty slot Thursday afternoon. I figure out how to get Thursday's work done on Wednesday and jump at the chance for studio time before class.
1/29/19
I wake up with a sore throat.
1/31/19, 4:00 p.m.
It's 20-something degrees out here with 20-mph winds on top of it as I wheel my yellow suitcase full of frit across the parking lot. In the studio it's a mere 70 degrees.
There's ice in the block buckets. The water line to the sander is frozen. The hose is frozen too.
The four of us here are all outside of our assigned times. My partner is last semester's classmate's partner. I've worked with him before. He's a lot of fun and very helpful. "What's your plan?" I ask him.
"I wanna warm up, make some mugs. I need to get better at them. Straight sides, thin walls."
"Me too, exactly."
He goes first so I can watch him.
He runs a block under his gather and the smoke rises. "I missed that smell," I tell him.
The clear glass this semester is from a different source. It's more compliant than last semester's glass. This glass does what I want it to do. I roll it in ruby red frit that looks like white powder, and when I go to open it up it opens up straight and almost even. I wrap it in a yellow thread and we get it into the annealer without incident.
"I have a confession to make," I tell my partner. "I've been going over the steps as I fall asleep every night." I also watched a few videos last week.
He flies through another cup.
I go for a fuchsia cat with a green tail. Standing at the bench to give the piece a puff of air before I shape the head, I feel dizzy and things start to go gray. I pause and roll the piece on the rails. When the buzz clears I can tell it's been more than a few seconds: the glass has cooled enough to change color. "Wow," I tell my partner. "I almost passed out." I go back to the glory hole for a re-heat. I flub the ears. The tail could be better.
He makes a bowl.
I touch a tray of frit to center it and burn my finger. Between cuts and burns, we agree, burns are better. They heal faster and only hurt for a few minutes.
I make a cup with Purple Passion frit mix. It looks like granite. It has texture to it as I use the jacks to shape the outside of the cup. We're both digging the colors.
He makes another cup, folding the colored gather onto itself to make swirls.
I'm pondering what to make next. "Make another cat," he says, so I mix green and yellow frit. We use more of the purple mix for the tail.
That's four pieces in the annealer on my first day back.
1/31/19, 6:00 p.m.
Our instructor singles me and last semester's classmate out as the focus of today's exercise. I look over to the technician, feigning panic. "No pressure," he grins. "No pressure!" I reply.
I spent most of last semester learning how to make a straight vessel: a small gather, a starter bubble, another gather, block, heat, cool the bottom, air, jack line, reheat, stretch, reheat, more air, more jack line, reheat, flatten the bottom, reheat, punty, flash, center, reheat, open the top, reheat, open the top some more, reheat, fix the shape, flash, put it away. This takes me something like 20 minutes.
Now he wants us to do the same thing with one gather (one?!?) and only one reheat (one?!?). Fuuuuuuuuuuuck. He demonstrates for us four times. He makes it look easy. He makes everything look easy.
Our instructor reminds us to be nice to the beginners in our labs next week. I look at the schedule. I'm paired with a beginner. I'm in a selfish panic. I'm afraid that I won't be able to advance without a more experienced person guiding me. "You can learn a lot by watching," the other technician reminds me. There are four of us assigned to Monday evenings. Two are beginners and the other is pretty much a master. I've worked with him before; he's the one who put eyes on one of my cats.
Four of us sign up for the exercise while the other advanced students can do whatever they want at the other bench. Before my classmate and I go we let the other two advanced students go first. They make it look easy too. When we try we both mess up.
The other two at our bench aren't going to go again; they're going home. I'm confused. "Most people just leave," she says. "They don't make anything at all."
So then it's just the two of us again. Nearly everyone else has cleared out. It feels like last semester. I'm good with that; my classmate and I know how to work together.
We try again and mess up twice more each. It's so bad that I ask our instructor to show us the big gather again. I finally get one right. It's tiny. I'm back to making hamster bowls. My classmate doesn't want to try again. "I guess I have my work cut out for me," he says.
By the time I've gathered all my things and washed my hands I'm the last student to leave. I tell our instructor that I had a successful afternoon session, that I was surprised at how much I remembered. "I have a confession to make," I say, and I tell him about my pre-sleep ritual. He says that's a great way to learn, and that he does the same thing. "When I have something new I want to try I've made it four times in my head before I get here. I even imagine where the tools are going to be."
He's lucky he can get all the way through it. "I keep falling asleep right when it's time to open the piece up," I tell him. "That's the part I'm trying to get right."
2/4/19
It's 50-something degrees out. The steel door to the studio is wide open. I fetch my cups and cats from the cabinet and take them to the sagging blue picnic table for their photo shoot.
The color I thought was red turns out to be a deep maroon. The top, not quite round, seems to have distorted in the annealer (my partner from last week, on his way out, looks at it and agrees).
The green and yellow combination worked pretty well.
This Purple Passion mix is da bomb.
I need to learn how to be less twisty when I trim the top. It shows.
The fuchsia is pretty groovy. I was hoping for more transparency. Maybe I laid it on too thick.
It's a good thing our instructor told us he doesn't care how our one-gather pieces turn out, as long as we can execute the move. Hmm. Well, this hamster bowl is a far sight better than the first one I made in September anyway.
Back in the studio the master glassblower is setting up. Neither of our assigned beginners has arrived. "Wanna work with me?" Hell, yeah! He must trust me! And that's how I got an advanced lab partner.
One of the beginners eventually comes in. The other never shows.
"We got your back," I tell him. His assignment is to pull stems, and he's good at it. Another technician, the one who had purple hair last semester, stops by to help him for a while. After he leaves my partner and I keep an eye on him. Not that he needs our help. I look over to see he's done one a foot long.
I decide to show him how to make a caterpillar. I've only ever tried one once. First I pull a stem. It's not a foot long but it is, by far, the best one I've ever made. I get three segments into the caterpillar before it gets cold. The beginner spends the rest of the evening on caterpillars, getting four segments a couple of times. Punk.
My partner is experimenting with what amounts to lampwork on a large scale. I hold the pipe, on which he has melded two segments of colored rod, while he holds a thin thread in one hand and the propane torch in the other. He puts dots and lines on as I slowly turn the pipe. We melt the color in and then he adds a layer of clear glass. As the piece grows the doodles stretch and deform in a whimsical pattern. He makes two large vases in this fashion. Each piece takes about 45 minutes from start to finish. It feels weird to be working at this bench. This is the bench that --- and ----- worked at last semester. I'm sitting in -----'s giving-air-chair, for heaven's sake.
Meanwhile, I'm flubbing two out of three one-gather vessels. I'm going too fast. I'm hell-bent on getting the assigned four into the annealer so that I can play with color. My partner tells me to slow down. I finally get four done. They're all tiny. My gathers are far too small. So much for pre-sleep learning. I'm missing something. In my notebook I write, "I NEED HELP."
I'm still too rushed when I play with more color to make a cup that I turn into a bowl at the last minute. Bad idea. I put it in the annealer but when it comes out it's going in the trash.
Screw it. I'm going to make a cat. Cat-making is relaxing. I mix a deep blue with a blue-green. I pull the ears. My partner offers eyes and scurries back with a green-yellow thread. I pull a tiny nose and we put the cat in the oven.
Free from going over one-gather vessels, I think of other things as I fall asleep. I'll ask for help on Thursday.
2/6/19
The green and yellow cat lives on my work computer now.
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