A Hot Mess, Part Nine: Failing Better

Pinocchio, the tiny blue cat

2/7/19

It looks like a party in the studio. There's a shopping bag full of soft pretzels on the table. I'm digging through my cavernous roller backpack looking for my glasses. I can't find them.

I pull out my notebook and fetch Monday's work from the cabinet. The blue cat is a keeper, even if his nose is all wrong. The glass that I used for the tail is the same glass I dabbed some of the body in and then hit with the torch. Pinocchio here is deep blue and silver.

The bowl I made at the end of Monday's class isn't as much of a mess as I thought it would be, but it's far from even on the sides and top.

The cabinet has more one-gather-one-reheat vessels than I know I made. They're all together. I fish through them and do my best to figure out which ones are mine. The others, it turns out, are from one of the advanced students, the one who always makes small, perfect vases.

*****

At this point I think I need to name the additions to the cast of characters. There are three assistants. On the schedule they're listed as "LT," for Lab Tech. So we'll call the first one I met LT1 and the second one LT2. The third, the guy with the formerly purple hair, is always going to be The Guy With The Purple Hair because I only learned his real name last week. 

LT2, who has seen years of students come and go, calls the woman who  makes the tiny vases "Tiny," and he calls her daughter, another advanced student, "Tiny's Daughter." 

I'm going to keep calling last semester's classmate My Classmate.

I need a name for my partner this semester, the one who puts the eyes on my cats. After watching him make a few pieces I think he should be the Glass Ninja. I'm going to call the guy who likes to play with color chemistry The Alchemist. Prodigy is the beginner in our Monday night session.

The woman I worked with last semester who sculpts little animals has such a fluid touch that I'm going to call her Grace. Classmate's Partner was My Classmate's partner last semester; I've worked with him a few times too. 

There will be more but that's enough for now.

*****

Tonight's assignment, which will take a couple of weeks, is to master the five basic shapes: a cylinder (which My Classmate and I already know how to make), a sphere, a cone, a volcano, and a plate. Our instructor demonstrates each one. I focus on the cone because it seems to require the most complicated shaping.

Half a dozen of us stick around for some bench time. I watch My Classmate work on a one-gather-one-reheat vessel with Tiny's Daughter. I'm up next; the two of them disappear, leaving me by myself. I call My Classmate back. Alchemy, who has been sitting on the sidelines, jumps in when My Classmate evaporates again. Alchemy helps me shape the cone. The goal is straight sides. With the top not all the way open I don't quite get there, but at least there's an obvious taper from top to bottom. We put it away. "I like the shape," our instructor says. "It's not quite what I'm going for, but I like the shape."

Alchemy and I talk color. I show him a picture of the brownish cup I made with glass I thought was going to be red. "I want a transparent, fire engine red," I mused.

"Follow me," Alchemy says, heading towards his locker. All of the major players here get their own lockers.

"Color," he says as we walk over. "Color, color, color." He rifles through the top shelf, moving boxes around. "Color, color, color. Color, color, color. Color, color, color. Here!"

He hands me a rod of glass. "Cherry red," he says. "Take some."

"I haven't worked with rods yet."

"That's okay. Take some."

We go back to the studio, where Tall Vase is using the wet saw. He cuts a sliver for me.  "Take more," Alchemy says, so Tall Vase cuts a bigger sliver.  I hand Alchemy the rest of the rod and he heads back to his locker. I follow him with a bag of rods I got with my starter pack. I've labeled the bag "yuck," because none of these are colors I want to be anywhere near, even for practice. Flamingo. Pigeon Blue. No, thanks. Alchemy isn't as disdainful and pulls out a couple. "Take them all," I suggest, but he doesn't.

Back in the studio our instructor enters with a lampworking torch adorned with logos better suited to a Grateful Dead concert. This starts a conversation among the four of us about things that the school does not permit to be made in the hot shop. (Ask me in person and I'll tell you the longer story. It's funny.)

Nearly everyone else has gone home so I get another chance at the bench. I make something close enough to a sphere that our instructor nods and I put it away.

There's an empty Saturday Morning slot a week from now. I take it. Will the Hill Slugs and Insane Bike Posse ever forgive me?  I have glass face. It's like bike face, only sootier.

I walk to the parking lot with Alchemy. We’ll try to work together one of these days.

At home I take another look at the bowl. I think I might want to throw it out, but I'll hang onto it for a while longer. I can do better; I should do better.

I plop the cat in the bowl to take them both upstairs, and now I'm sure I can't get rid of it just yet. They go together like a cat and a basket.

Pinocchio comes to work with me for now. He's small enough to fit on the window ledge. I Blu-Tack him there just in case.

I'm going to have to put eyes on all of my cats. Now the green one, eyeless, looks weird.

2/11/19

"You wanna go first?" Glass Ninja asks me. "Where's your head at?"

"I'm not decompressed yet. You go." He's got a  big piece planned. He shows me how to turn a pipe on the threader and gives me a rough outline of his design. It's going to take a while.

Prodigy comes in. He'll be blowing bubbles and making jack lines tonight. By 5:15 it's clear his partner isn't going to show up, again.

I show Glass Ninja the cone and sphere from last week. The cone isn't quite a cone and the sphere is more of a soap bubble.

"I'll help you with those," he says.

Glass Ninja starts with a collar, then a color rod under a gather of clear glass that he fashions into a point and has me keep warm while he gets a thread ready. We go to the threader where I spin the pipe as fast as I can. The pipe moves down the threader, picking up a thin, even line of black. Then there's more reheating and blowing until the cone is a sphere. He pokes a hole in the side and I keep it warm while he puts together another rod and pulls it hollow to fit over the hole in the piece I'm babysitting. The threads, once vertical, are now horizontal circles. There's more jujitsu, and I lose the plot while I try to offer some help to Prodigy, who has far more mastery of glass than either I or My Classmate had during our second week of lab.

An hour and a half later Glass Ninja has a gigantic vase and Prodigy has put a jack line in a dozen bubbles.

"You can have the rest of the class," Glass Ninja says, somewhat exhausted.

He guides me through a funnel, which, with the help of his coaching, ends up with straight edges. The volcano takes three people and we put that one away. The plate is dramatic: it ends with me spinning the pipe as quickly as possible at an angle outside of the glory hole. I'm not quite fast enough on my first try. I re-heat and go again, spinning it flat this time. "Not bad for a first attempt," he says. The sphere is anticlimactic.

It's 8:00. Glass Ninja wants to try his jujitsu vase again, but smaller this time. When he's finished I want to test out some more of my colors by making a cup or a cat.

By 8:30 it's clear he won't be finished any time soon. LT2 saunters in at 8:40 and takes over as assistant while I start a cat with Prodigy at the torch for the ears. I'm going faster than I'd like to but LT2 is shutting the furnace off at 9:00. When I'm ready for the tail, Glass Ninja is there with it. LT2 brings me a collar.

"You want devil red eyes?" Glass Ninja asks.

"Yeah!" As I watch him I tell him, "I need to learn how to do that."

At 8:55 the cat is ready for break-off. We do the usual run over the jack line, the drops of water, and the tap on the pipe to break the glass at the base.

Instead the cat's head pops off.

Glass Ninja rushes it over to the annealer and, with more work than ought to be necessary, we get the body off the pipe and into the oven.  I've made something like 16 cats so far. This is the first not to come off the pipe. Oh well. At least I'll be able to see the colors.

2/12/19

I'm on a conference call for work, at home, during a snowstorm. The window sill is getting crowded.

12/14/19

Before class starts I lay out all of the shapes and the red-eyed, silver-masked, headless cat, whom I've named Lucifer.

 

Fortunately the head fits snugly to the body. When I get home I'll glue Lucifer back together.

The plate is slightly wonky. I grind it down so that it rests evenly on the table. Because I didn't open it up all at once it's not completely flat.

My second attempt at a cone came out better.

We're getting another class session to practice our shapes. Our instructor demonstrates the funnel again. This time it's more curved than angular, and it's a cup shape that I want to try. Next he repeats the plate.

"How do we know when it's time to take it out of the glory hole to spin it?" I ask.  He doesn't have an exact answer. It needs to be at the point of collapse, which we can only determine by having a few collapse on us in the glory hole.

I try a plate again. The pipe is dirty, which gives me lots of little air bubbles in the glass. This time I spin it out in one go. I think I've done a decent job until I see the one My Classmate makes. From where I'm standing it looks smooth and flat and perfect, of course.

"If I go again can I play?" I ask our instructor.

"You can play."

So I make a cat from a color I haven't tried yet. Once again I'm up against the end of class time. I try not to rush, but I mess up the jack line for the head. Our instructor scolds me for not giving the pipe long, full rolls on the bench, something I know to do but have somehow forgotten. "That's why your jack line is so wonky," he says. Funny, I've been telling Prodigy to make full rolls. Our instructor says, "Doctor, heal thyself."

This time I get the head screaming hot and pull the ears without using a torch. Much better. Classmate's Partner brings me a bit for the tail but it's too small. Our instructor gives him some pointers and brings me a bigger bit, which I use to cover the smaller one. I use the torch on the gold tail to give it a metallic sheen. I have the same color underneath the green but I've put too much green on top; the gold is completely hidden. So much to learn.

We have an assignment to draw 25 shape combinations.


2/16/19

Slugs forgive me, I'm blowing glass on a Saturday morning. That most of the other Slugs are off their bikes today too makes me feel better about it.

My partner is Sleepless. I worked with her at the end of last semester, and we had a blast. Today is no different.

Grace and Tall Vase are working at the expert bench. Grace is making horses in one move. Tall Vase is making sculptures.

With a day-job week from hell looming, I stress-bought more frit last week: aurora sunrise mix and reactive mix, the latter of which had neither a picture nor a description. At $16 it was worth a gamble.

Sleepless helps me through a sunrise funnel cup, and I help her with a pink pumpkin. I pull a straight cup with the reactive mix, and she makes another pumpkin.

Meanwhile we've been waiting for the annealer to cool down so that we can see our work from Thursday. Our instructor has been here since noon. I ask if I can get my stuff so that I don't make the same mistakes again today. He checks the temperature and says it's not ready yet.

I guess this means I can abandon the shapes and play instead.

After watching Sleepless use a mold I want to try. We pick a smaller mold so that I can make a cup. I start with a white around the core bubble and dark purple on the second gather. When I drop my hot glass in it's clear my gather is too big for the mold. I pull out a long blob with a ridged cone on the far end. It droops over.

"It's a mouse!" I exclaim. I've been wanting to make a mouse. "Let's try for some ears."

I fail miserably at that. They're deer ears, crooked and leaning. To make matters worse, I knock the mouse's nose against the side of the glory hole, and now it has schmutz on its face that isn't going to come off. The tail is a squiggly mess. We put it away anyhow. You have to start somewhere, after all, and you must go where the glass takes you.

I try again, using the pumpkin mold this time, and this time I get a real bowl out of it. Neato!

It's 1:00; our session is over. I ask our instructor again if I can retrieve my stuff. He checks the temperature, thinks for a second and says, "You're gonna be here Monday, right?"

"Yeah."

"Wait."

I smile and groan and turn away to clean up.

Sleepless approaches him. "Can I see my stuff from Thursday?"

He says, "I know what you're doing. First she asks, then you ask. You guys are so impatient!"

So we have to wait.

At home I draw 25 shape combinations.

In the evening an idea pops into my head. I draw it.


2/18/19

The next two days at work are going to be straight from hell. I get everything prepped before I leave for class and try to clear my head.

Glass Ninja can't make it in tonight. Instead Classmate's Partner is going to stick around. It's a good thing, because it looks as if Prodigy's partner isn't going to show. That's three weeks in a row.  "He comes to class," Prodigy says, perplexed.

Classmate's Partner runs out to get some food. This gives me time to retrieve Thursday's work, finally.

The cat is more lumpen and leaning than I thought it would be. The color, from the starter pack, is opaque. I wouldn't have chosen an opaque color on my own. It's pretty enough though. Maybe it reacted with the underlying gold, because the color isn't even. Where I pinched the ears there's a deep blue crease, which I like. The gold tail reduced to a reddish-silver. From the underside I can see what the gold color would have been had I not torched it. I'll have to use it again.

The bubble-filled plate is arguably worse than my first one, but flatter. This one is slightly off-center.

I show Classmate's Partner my idea: I want to make a funnel cup with a sphere for the bottom. I'm not sure if the sphere should be solid or hollow. We'll try it both ways. He looks at my drawing. I've tried to figure out the steps, starting the same way I would with a cat, but opening up what would have been the body. He thinks it should work.

In capable hands it might work, but in mine it fails three times. The first one, rolled in deep blue, starts off well enough, but the walls are too thin and I blow it out way too far and unevenly. It's now a perfect sitting cat shape, so we go with it.  I think it's bigger than all of the other cat's I've made. I pull out the ears without a torch. Classmate's Partner brings me a tail from one of the colors I have sitting out on the table. It doesn't stand up in the annealer, which is a bad sign. I hope I can grind it down.

When it's my turn again I decide I should try a plate. I roll the glass in brilliant yellow but I somehow get the gather farther off center than I ever have and I can't rescue it. I try to heat it up and re-center it in the glory hole, but I get it too hot and it slumps into nothingness.

I try again with clear glass and get a slightly off-center plate out of it. Classmate's Partner thinks I probably took it out of the glory hole a little too early, before the heat on the edges was even. He tells me I need to keep it in there until it's really moving around on me. In other words, I should keep it in there until I think it's too far gone.

My next attempt at the double shape fails too. I've managed to pinch off the bubble so that I can't open the top half up into a cup. Working with Classmate's Partner, I know we'll let the glass take us wherever it's going. When it doubt, put a wrap on it. He goes for a bit and I mess with the dent where the hole should be. I work at it, hoping to poke through, and wind up with something that looks like the top of an apple. I grab the leaf mold. Classmate's Partner brings a bit. Instead of a blob it becomes a string, and we droop it over like a stem. He calls is an apple-cherry. I call it art and we put it away.

Right. I've laid out some fucshia but I'm going to work with clear glass this time so that I can see what I'm doing. I get closer this time, in that there's a bottom and a top, but the bottom is too big and goes flat on me, while the top is too small and I get it so hot that when I open it up it's wide and squat and icky. When it doubt, put a wrap on it. Classmate's Partner brings me a fucshia bit. I don't know what it is, but we put it away.

LT1 comes in and lets me get Saturday's work out of the annealer.

Once, just once, I would like to have two good days in a row. Just once!

The purple pumpkin bowl came out better than I expected.

I'll have to grind down the bottom of the aurora sunrise cup so that it stands straight. There's a piece of punty still on the base.

I'm gong to have to show the reactive mix cup to Alchemy.

A little of this frit against another color -- maybe that gold I have -- might be something. I wonder what would happen if we were to torch it.

The mouse, though. I'm not even going to try to get it to stand up. Most likely I'll wrap it in newspaper, smash it with the glass-smashing mallet lying on the table, and reuse the smithereens as frit.

2/20/19

Lumpy goes to work with me.

He and Pinocchio watch the snowstorm.

Green Cat comes home and joins Scarface on the window sill. They look good together.

The purple pumpkin bowl goes next to the first pumpkin bowl I made early last semester. I'd filled the old one with purple decorative marbles to give it some life. I think I want to make more pumpkin bowls.

2/21/19

The sun is out today. Lumpy shows off some gold.

I pull Monday's failures, er, art, out of the cabinet and set them on the grinding table to wait their turn.

The problem with failures, other than that they're failures, is that if they become something interesting, repeating what was done to get there is nigh on impossible.

I've been wanting to make a tall cat for a while. This one is tall, and light, too. But the shape happened because the glass was too thin when I blew it out, and it blew out unevenly. It was too thin and lopsided to shape into a vessel, so it became a cat.

The apple-cherry happened because I had too little glass and too tight a jack line. I pinched off the bubble and squashed the round base. In digging for the bubble I created an indentation. The stem was going to be a wrap but we decided a leaf would be better. The bit for the leaf was too thin when I drew it out, so we let it droop like a cherry stem.

This one came closest to what I was going for. I wanted a sphere-shaped base with a funnel-shaped vessel sitting on top. Again the sphere got squashed, I had too little glass, and the opening got away from me. We saved it with a fucshia wrap. Even though I gave it some time in the glory hole so that the wrap would melt into the vessel's sides, a piece of the wrap came off, probably in the annealer.

There isn't much time to sand the bottoms down before our instructor herds us all into the classroom down the hall. He has my classmate and me put out our notebooks with our 25 combination shape drawings. He then divides the room into two teams and instructs us to pick a shape to make in the studio.

I'm in a group with Glass Ninja, Tall Vase, Sleepless, The Kid, and another advanced student I talk to a lot but haven't found a suitable pseudonym for. Glass Ninja suggests we try two volcanoes separated by a sphere.

I lobby for the nesting funnels, but the object of the exercise is to make everything at once, and do it quickly. Nesting funnels would require more precision than most of us can handle.

Another option is to put a sphere between two funnels, but that's already been done. There's one sitting on top of one of the annealing ovens. I've seen it but it's only now that I realize what it's doing up there.

The other group is going first, which gives us time to figure out who's doing what and generally get ourselves confused.

Our instructor has written a message on the blackboard: Every lab has to make a combination piece. I'm going to be here Saturday, and my regular lab is Monday. Including today I'll be involved in three of these exercises.

The other group -- LT2, My Classmate, Classmate's Partner, Tiny, and Alchemy -- makes a large sphere attached to a large cylinder.

Ours is more complicated. It involves some fancy orchestration, with me making the sphere (I take over for Pseudonymless when her sphere collapses) while Glass Ninja makes the first volcano. Pseudonymless brings a bit and we weld our two pieces together. He reheats the combination while Tall Vase finishes his volcano. Someone brings another bit and they weld the volcano to the opposite end of the sphere. Sleepless, getting over a cold and not wanting to contaminate all the pipes, orchestrates the action and minds the furnace door.

It's a little off-kilter but they get it into the annealer.

Now it's time to play. I help Glass Ninja make a complicated vase involving twisted canes he made earlier. On the other bench My Classmate is adding colored frit to a blown-out bubble ahead of making a plate. It collapses in the glory hole, which is something that our instructor told us we'll have to experience in order to know when too much is too much. He presses the collapsed shape against the floor and puts the mess into the annealer.

I roll a gather in yellow frit and set up for a plate. It goes pretty well, except that Tall Vase has something big going and needs the glory hole. Heating isn't as easy over the furnace. Alchemy wanders over to give me some advice. Fortunately I get my last few minutes in the glory hole, waiting until the piece gets super-melty, to the point of near collapse, before I yank it out and hold the pipe at a 45-degree angle downward, spinning it like mad until it goes flat. I'm not sure when to stop spinning, so I let Glass Ninja and Alchemy say when.

When I'm up again I try the same thing with fuschia powder. This time I make my jack line farther off the pipe, too far, and I have little glass left to work with. The lip almost implodes but, with Tall Vase's guidance, I rescue it instead of tossing it. I spin it out just in time. Glass Ninja is at the break-off table. "Looks nice and flat, lady!" he says. It's a little off-center. One problem at a time.

I pester our instructor about the shape I'd been trying to make on Monday. I show him my failures and ask if I'm going about it the wrong way. We use my combination shape drawing to discuss it. I let him draw on top of and next to my sketch. He goes to erase it but I stop him. It'll help me when I try again on Saturday or Monday or whenever.

2/22/19

Hmm. Well, I definitely have a color palate unlike anyone else in class.

I also have no more room for the pieces I haven't stuffed in a box for eventual re-melting.

I bring the apple-cherry to work.

It sits on the window sill, guarded by Pinocchio, who asks, "What the hell is that?  Is it going to bite me?"