Monday, March 18, 2019

A Hot Mess, Part Eleven

Mojo tells me not to quit my day job.

3/4/19

Well, this is all very disappointing.

The mouse doesn't look much like a mouse at all.



The flower is limp and has a bunch of sharp edges.



Alchemy crossed his name off the schedule for today. Prodigy has smashed-up pane glass with him but I don't much like the color.

Classmate's Partner is staying on to work with Prodigy. Glass Ninja has two big projects in mind. I'm going to try to use a rod today, for the first time. I'm too chicken to use the saw; I want to watch someone else use it one more time. Ninja cuts a piece for me.

While we wait for the rods to get to 1000 degrees I pour out one of the sample colors I bought during a fit of work stress late last week. It's called "Royal Purple" and I'm not sure what it's supposed to look like. The shape ends up pretty much how I want; the color looks more like pus than purple. One never knows until the piece is out of the oven.

Ninja's first piece takes well over an hour. It involves two rod overlays, where the second and third rods get melted on top of the first. Setting up one rod takes maybe five minutes for someone at his level; three takes about fifteen. He's making a bowl with feet (I bring the bits for him to crimp) and a lip wrap (I bring the bit for that too).

Because I was too chicken to try the saw, Ninja assumes I'll be too chicken to light the big torch to reduce the inside of his giant bowl. Wrong. Let me at it. I can be bad-ass.


Now it's my turn to set up a rod. All goes well enough, if not slowly, until it's time to expand the core bubble into the first gather. The bubble blows out unevenly, somehow folding in on itself. I mess with it for a few minutes before deciding to bail. I blow the bubble out into a bucket and Ninja smashes it into shards for me to use again later.


I have had no luck with this color, and, yes, I can rest part of the blame on the color. No two colors act the same way. Some are soft, as I suspect this one is. I've lost control of the shape each time I've used it. Other colors, like whites, are notoriously stiff, while some, like black, turn soupy.

I have a suitcase full of sample rods and sample frits. I've been working my way through them since January, seeing what they look like by themselves, seeing how they mix with other colors, and deciding whether or not I like how they turn out.

Capri blue, which showed up as rod and frit in the student sample packs, is a deep, transparent, light blue, with a hint of green. I've made two bowls from it so far; both times I lost control of the shape.

I have a piece of cherry red rod in the warmer. Alchemy gave it to me a few weeks ago. I'll try that one later.  Meanwhile, Ninja lets me go again. I pull a quick, funnel-shaped cup from the second sample frit. The color is "Chalcedony", which is supposed to be opalescent, I think. Right now it looks brownish. Classmate's Partner comes over while I'm working, curious about the color. I show him flecks of blue that are appearing as the bottom cools down.

Ninja goes again. This time his project takes an hour and fifteen minutes. It's now 8:45. There's no time for me to try a rod again. I take it out of the oven and set it on the table. It cracks as it cools, but Ninja says I can still use it later.

There's one more color I want to play with. It's called "Chameleon," which, if the online photo is to be believed, is a mixture of light green and light blue. There's no time to worry about shape. I'll get what I get.

What I get is a small bowl, which we wrap with Iris Blue. The wrap goes on thick and a little too cold. When I try to cut the end off with the diamond shears it takes two hands. Somehow I manage to pinch my finger between the handles. Not until I go to the glory hole to melt the wrap into the bowl do I notice blood all over the punty rod. I have to hand it off to Ninja so that I can get a bandage for my finger and a paper towel for the blood on the punty and the shears. Ninja goes to the bench and torches the blue glass until it reduces.

All in all it wasn't a bad night. I got three pieces in, testing three of the four new sample colors. I learned how not to put air into a rod. And I know I can whip out a wrapped bowl in fifteen minutes if I'm willing to shed a little blood.


3/5/19

We finally have a sunny day and I finally have a few minutes at my desk in the late afternoon. Frog-Eyed Kitty is glowing. The cats and the apple-cherry are casting colored shadows.










3/7/19

There's just enough time and light left to get pictures of Monday's work out on the snow-covered, sagging, blue picnic table.

Everything looks better through the camera lens.

I don't much like Royal Purple. The pus color never changed. I must have laid it on too thick.


Chalcedony is muddy-looking.



I like Chameleon though.




Class attendance is low tonight. Our instructor demonstrates how to set up glass for the threader, and how to use the threader. I've been wanting to try this since last semester. Our threader is two pairs of pulleys set three feet apart on an iron sawhorse. Next to it is a y-shaped yoke. The trick is to rest the pipe on the sawhorse with the glass sticking out past the yoke. One person brings a hot, pointy bit of colored glass to the yoke and touches the end of the glass to the glass on the base of the pipe. The person at the pipe then spins the pipe like mad on the pulleys. The glass spins with the pipe as the pipe moves down the holder and color is pulled off the yoke, producing, if one is good enough, a thin, even wrap of color all along the glass gather. 

I'd be happy with just that, but there's more. Our instructor heats the glass again and uses a knife to pull down on the threads, towards the pipe, on one side, then the other, then a reheat, then the two opposite sides, then a reheat, then more pulls, this time away from the pipe, creating a feathered pattern.

When it comes time to blow glass, it's just me and Classmate's Partner who sign up. "I'm under some pressure to make a mouse," I tell our instructor. "There's an MD-PhD student graduating in two weeks. I promised him a mouse."  I have no idea how I'm going to do it, considering that my last attempt was a comic failure.

This time I don't try to make a separate head. Instead I lean on the jacks to fashion a point. I lean, reheat, lean, and reheat until the end looks like a nose. Classmate's Partner brings me bits. Our instructor fetches me a wide, flat set of tweezers to mush the glass into ear shapes. The ears are a little crooked and not quite the same size, but at least the thing looks like a mouse. He brings me a bit for the tail and we get that on without a problem. We break the mouse off the pipe and put it away.

"I made a mouse! I made a mouse!" I'm far too excited by this. "Can I do it again?" So we make another one, with fifteen minutes left of class time. This one is a little bigger, a little more crooked, and has a bigger break-off hole than the first. But I now have two mice.

I'm so psyched by this that I send the MD-PhD student and one of the post-docs a text: "OMG OMG YOU GUYS I MADE A MOUSE!"  I attach a blurry picture from the annealer.


At home I take some more pictures of the Royal Purple cup, hoping the change in light will make it look better. It doesn't.





The whole collection is far more earthy than my usual color palette.



3/9/19

Today is another day I ought to have been on my bike. But in a week I'll be in London; I need this day to make up for the studio time I'll lose over spring break.

Saturday mornings are Sleepless' lab days. I'm her partner again. She has two multicolor rod samples she wants to use to make goblets. Glass Ninja, who was her partner last Saturday, showed her a better way to make goblets, and now she can make them all from one piece.

Before we start we find someone in the sculpture room so that Sleepless can borrow some clay to patch the bottom of our class project. The vase has been lying sideways on the table for two weeks now. The clay looks like soil at the bottom of the vase. We set it back on the table.


While Sleepless sets up her rods, I take the mice outside. The snow makes for a convenient surface to shove them into.




Grace is making horses again. She's getting much better at it. There are far fewer carcasses stuck to punty rods in the bucket; she's getting them into the annealer instead.

Sleepless makes a goblet from blue frit. The bottom of the bubble goes down into the top of the stem for a pretty effect.

Sleepless is good at teaching me how to use rods. I try Alchemy's Cherry Red first. We make a cup with that as the core and wrap it with Brilliant Yellow.

Strange things are happening with Sleepless' rods. Cut on an angle, because that's how they were sent to her and she doesn't want to waste any glass, the rods shift to one side after we get the bubble in. The asymmetry makes for a fascinating bulls-eye pattern, but it also throws off the balance as she tries to shape the glass. The first one doesn't make it to the oven.

I try for another rod, Canary Yellow from the starter kit. As I heat the first gather I decide to roll it in the sample Cherry Red frit that I didn't test last week. The shape of this cup isn't as good as the first one, but that's my fault, not the rod's.

Sleepless uses another rod for another goblet. We get farther along this time, but when we break it off to transfer it to the punty, the piece falls to the ground. She gives up for the day. I beg her to stay for the last fifteen minutes to help me with one last color test.

Early in the semester I played with Copper Ruby Light, a color I thought was going to be more red than the maroon-purple it turned out to be. I'd laid it on pretty heavily then; today I'm going to coat the core bubble with it instead and see what happens.

Copper Ruby Light is a "striking color," which means that it'll only turn red when it's heated. The powder looks white. We can see it on the core bubble when I get the next gather on top of it, but by the time I spin it out into a lopsided bowl, the color has all but disappeared.

As we're cleaning up I wonder aloud where Alchemy is. "He usually comes in early," I say, and, as if on cue, he enters the studio. He wants to show me something. He disappears and comes back with a family-sized tub of pink frit. He motions me to follow him into the hallway, away from the fluorescent lights. The glass now looks pale blue. I have beads like this at home.

"Neo Lavender," he says.

"Can I try some?"

"Sure!"

I pull out an empty container (I always carry a few for scrap), prepared to fill it with a few ounces. He fills it to the top instead. The "neo," he explains, is neodymium, the same mineral in our safety glasses.

"I'm taking Thursday off," I tell him. "I'm going on vacation Friday. I'm gonna be here Thursday at 1:00. There's still an empty slot. Wanna blow glass on Thursday?" He thinks for a minute and puts his name on the schedule.

Outside is warm and sunny and I have a massive dose of bike guilt made worse by Tom, the leader of the Insane Bike Posse, who has sent me the now obligatory photo of the crew giving me the middle finger.



3/11/19

Low Key is dragging her glass-filled rolling case behind her as we pass on the walkway. "Ninja's already blowing," she says.

"Of course he is," I smile and scurry along.

The steel door is wide open. Sunset is an hour later. The light in the studio is different. It feels like spring, finally.

Prodigy has arrived early too. He's helping Ninja, which gives me time to fetch Saturday's pieces from the cabinet.

Tiny's Daughter and Classmate's Partner are just finishing up when I come back into the studio with my pieces. They hover around the rod cups, Tiny's Daughter gushing, "You were meant to blow glass."

"Wow! Thanks! Nobody's ever told me that before."

I figure she's being polite and encouraging. The person who is meant to blow glass is assisting Ninja right now.

There's time for me to go out to the sagging blue picnic table to take pictures. But before I do that I go to the color waste bin to see if Sleepless' cracked rod scrap is still there. It is. I carry everything outside.

The red cup is the best thing I've made so far, I think. One of my classmates said, "Once you start using rods you never go back." The color is so even!


Here's rod on the inside and frit on the outside.


I can get the bowl to sit more evenly if I grind it down some. I didn't put enough frit on the core bubble; the color is thin and dispersed.


Sleepless' scrap looks like a geode. I'm going to grind down the sharp edges and give this to her on Thursday.




Prodigy has a partner today, a beginner who is already using more glass than I ever will. He's confident and headstrong. I'm going to call him Go Big.

My first piece will be with Alchemy's Neo Lavender. I put two layers on the core bubble and two on the first gather. The color almost entirely disappears into the clear glass. There's enough there that I can still sort of see it. I stop shaping when the top is partially open. It's wide at the bottom and curves inwards as it curves up. I like how it looks now so I'm going to put it away as is.

Glass Ninja is going to use the threader today. I want to use it too. He walks me through it again. I've worked the threader for him before. This time the pipe jumps the pulleys for an instant, but it's not bad enough to ruin the threading.

When my turn comes, the setup, with the rod and then the first gather cooling, takes a while. I'm trying Capri Blue again, one more time. The wrap will be Dark Violet. I think that'll be contrasting enough. By the time I get the wrapped piece feathered, blown out, and back into the glory hole, it's clear that the colors aren't contrasting enough. The piece is small and the top is thick. I guess I could have blown it out more and then perhaps the wrap would have been more apparent. Again I stop when I like the shape, sort of vase-ish, narrower at the bottom, puffing out at the top, and curving back in again, the lip slightly off-center.

At the other bench, Prodigy and Go Big are making giant bowls and doing things that I still haven't learned, like making floppy edges and curving the sides in and out again. They're still new enough at this that they admit the shapes are partially accidental.

Glass Ninja has a big project in mind. He's drawn it on the chalkboard. Between the stiff lavender core bubble and the black canes at the bottom, we're both fighting the glass the entire time. The heat differences are wreaking havoc on the shape. Glass Ninja finally wrestles it into submission and pulls a stem and foot. The canes start at the foot and reach up into the color of the vase. He has a perfect oval shape and a small lip at the top. I wonder aloud if there's enough room in the annealer for this, and we discuss where to put it.

Glass Ninja is one step away from the final flash, giving the vase one last tweak, when the whole thing breaks off the punty and falls neatly into the water of the block bucket, shattering, irretrievable.

We give him a few minutes to walk it off and then it's time, with fifteen minutes left in class, for me to make a mouse.

This one has a core bubble rolled in Cherry Red frit. Ninja brings me perfect bits of Neo Lavender for the ears. I put them on aligned and squashed into perfect ear shapes. I'm too chicken to try putting eyes on, so Ninja does it. We flub the tail but recover it. I give it one last flash and take it back to the bench to break it off.

The tail and the glass that holds it stays on the pipe. "Put it away anyway," I tell Ninja. At least it stands up. I can sand down the rough spots.


3/12/19

With a day from hell ahead of me, I place the two mice on my desk and request that people vote for which one they want to give to our graduating MD-PhD student, keeping in mind that I have a mid-term critique in two days, where skill will be more important than cuteness. I spend the day in a windowless basement, in front of a hissing, spitting machine. When I get back the votes are in. The better-executed mouse will go back to class with me. The sloppier one has more character. I place it on my computer and pack the cats and the apple-cherry, which are going to the critique.



3/13/19

The MD-PhD student is giving a practice talk. I arrive ahead of time and give him his mouse, which he keeps on the table while he presents his research.


I don't know what to bring to the critique. I fill a box with cats and cups, the apple-cherry, the lopsided bowl, my basic shapes, and the pink flower.


3/14/19

Balancing the box of finished pieces under one arm and dragging my rolling case of frit and rods in the other, I get to the studio a little before 1:00. My vacation from work has officially begun.

Go Big and Low Key get started. Alchemy and I putter around. He's happy that he's finally working with someone who isn't "chomping at the bit to get started."  We talk about color. I show him the Neo Lavender bowl. "The color disappeared," I tell him.




"Yeah, you need to lay it on thick. I put six layers on my core bubble." Six!

He gives me some Champagne rod to play with. He pours out a giant pile of Neo Lavender. While we wait for our rods to warm up I take pictures outside. The gray table that was inside the studio is now outside, having been replaced by a sleek, metal table. I use the old table for pictures because it catches the light coming through the glass.

The ass-less mouse is cute. I'll have to sand it down.




The threaded vessel needs to live in a sunny window.




Alchemy tells me to go first. I layer the core bubble four times with the lavender glass. We inspect it and he tells me to keep adding more until the color is even all over. It takes me seven layers to make that happen. Then I add two more to the first gather. It takes forever. I apologize for eating up so much time.

At the other bench, Go Big has several feet of something vase-like sticking off his punty rod. I can't get into the glory hole to control the heat on my piece. The lavender is making the glass more soupy than I'm used to. Every time I get it back in shape and reheat it I lose the shape again. 

I finally get it to something I'm happy with and we wrap it with Iris Blue, which, if I don't reduce it, will come out cobalt. Now I get a chance in the glory hole. I start to lose the shape again. Instead of taking it out now and living with a shape I won't like, I decide to keep it in and spin it out into a bowl or plate or whatever happens. I wait until I'm about to lose control completely and pull it out, spinning until it becomes a bowl. The sides are uneven, the wrap thickness having pulled one side down farther than the rest. Alchemy likes it. To him it's art. To me it's a failure.

Alchemy goes next, starting with a rod and draping a multi-colored puck he made on Saturday over it. He pulls down on the puck so that it reaches onto the core color in little fingers. He gathers more glass over it. After each step he pauses to look at the piece. I ask, "What's next?"

"I dunno yet," he says. 

Outside, a turkey vulture perches on the chimney of a nearby building.



Eventually Alchemy's piece becomes a teardrop vase with a long, thin neck that he curves to one side.

A bulb that's been flickering all afternoon finally gets to us and Alchemy turns out the lights. I take a few more pictures using my notebook as the background. The lighting and the white background help show the pale lavender in the bowl.


The lavender in the mouse's ears shows up too.


Now I want to try using two rods. I have two from the sample pack in the warmer. One is some sort of blue and the other is a deep red. I pick them up one at a time, and that seems straightforward enough.

Then the trouble begins. After the first gather, the color seems squashed up against the pipe. It looks as if I'll need more glass than I have in order to get them both expanded enough. I get another gather and now I'm in way over my head. I'm beyond my comfort zone with this much glass.  I decide to stretch the bubble after we get air all the way to the end, and in doing this I miss putting in the jack line.

No matter what I do now I can't get a jack line in. Alchemy suggests sacrificing some color and trying to get the line in farther down on the bubble. I try a little farther out and get nothing. He scores the glass with a knife. Nothing.

We decide to punty it anyway. I let him bring the punty because I have no idea how big to make it with this much glass.

We drop water on the pipe end and hit the pipe to knock the piece off. Low Key comes over to watch.

Nothing.

We pour water on it. The glass crackles at the surface.

Nothing.

More water. More crackle. More hitting the pipe.

The punty falls off.

I take the glass back to the glory hole while Alchemy reheats the punty.

The piece explodes in the glory hole.

We clean up for the day. 

Alchemy moves to the sander to finish two vases before crit starts. I join him, chatting while I borrow his sandpaper to smooth out the ass-less mouse's bottom.

It's getting on towards 6:00. Classmates begin to wander in, lining up at the sander. I give Sleepless her rod-geode.  We take our work into the classroom at the end of the hall. Sleepless, Grace, and I take up a table. Clearly I've brought too much, and nobody else wrote notes.


I'm expecting everyone to tell me everything I'm doing wrong. I'm expecting to fill a page in my notebook with hints and instructions.

That doesn't happen. We each explain our work in a sentence or two and describe what we want to do next. Everyone is friendly.

I'm third after Sleepless, who brought four goblets because that's what she's focusing on now, and Grace, who has a herd of horses because that's what she's focusing on now.

Clearly I'm not focused.  By way of explanation, I say, "I want to try all the things."

I describe Frog-Eyed Kitty as "giving the side-eye because he's done with everyone's shit." From the back of the room, The Kid says, "Doesn't that describe all cats?"

I pick up the Royal Purple cup as an example of my experiments with color. "It looks like pus."  Tiny's Daughter chirps, "I like it!" I should give her some of the frit to play with.

My experiment with Iris Gold, unreduced, I call "pus' cousin."  We talk about how Copper Ruby Light "just disappeared," as Sleepless puts it.

All night there's a lot of discussion about color: what is reacting with what, and how; whether or not lead leaches from colored glass if we use it for drinking; how different manufacturer's colors react differently; and how some reducing colors don't behave the same way from one use to the next.

I learn a lot by seeing everyone else's work, from two-foot-tall scalloped vases to LT1's puffy chickens.

About the chickens, one was named "Mother Clucker," to which someone said, "But females don't have combs."

"Hey!" I said, "Let's not assign gender roles!"

"Some do!" LT1 said in defense. "I checked!"

At the end of the night, one of the advanced glassblowers sets up a portable light box and invites us to put our work in. He has a digital SLR camera. He takes pictures then lets us use our phones.

I assemble the most colorful of my crew for a group photo.


So, what next? I really ought to focus on something. Our next assignment will require us to make a series of pieces that relate to each other. I need to think, or maybe not to think so much.

3/15/19

I need to finish packing, but the box of glass from last night is distracting me. I unpack it, moving pieces to the reject box and to the window sill. There's not much light coming through right now because of the rain.  I arrange the glass in chronological order, from January to February:


From February to March:


And from the last few weeks:


I want to try wrapping again for sure. I want to learn how to make my own eyes, more broadly, how to draw with a glass rod. I want to put two rods on and not screw up.

I want to focus. That's going to be the toughest task of all.



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