three guesses
3 September to 22 October 2020
I: First Day
I'm early. Getting through campus security didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would. There was no line. This place is a ghost town. I presented the all-clear smiley face on my phone and got my wrist band in about thirty seconds.
I round the corner and, instinctively, look for our flower under the metal spider sculpture. The center is full of mulch. I lean down and clean it up. Much better.
Class nights are broken into three segments now. There's no more chatty mob of quasi-nerd-artists munching from a giant bag of corn chips, mostly not paying attention to Our Instructor's demonstration. There's no rush to the white board to sign up for bench time for the night. Instead, Our Instructor guides the three newest advanced students from 6:00 to 7:00. The rest of us get to sign up online for one of four slots at 7:00 or four slots at 8:45.
I watch from outside as Our Instructor finishes up with the new crowd. I have a box of medical-style disposable masks for him. That's the type I plan to use in here because I can discard them when they get sweaty. I don't want to bring anything home that could be contaminated. I've got alcohol wipes and hand sanitizer with me, too.
There's hand sanitizer next to the break-off table. Our Instructor is still working out how to sterilize the heat-resistant hood we wear when we put big pieces away. I'm not putting that skanky thing on my head no matter what he ends up doing. I'll risk burning my forehead before I mess with that virus-to-face delivery system.
When campus shut down, there was no warning. The pieces people made on March 22 are still in the annealer. Our names are still on the white board. In the hallway, the cabinet of finished pieces is full; nobody could come to take them home.
The glory hole is down; the thermostat crapped out and a new one is on order. That's fine with me. If last semester taught me nothing else, it's how to use the furnace as a glory hole. Without the glory hole, we're only using one of the two benches so that nobody gets in anyone else's way. I'm cool with that too, because Glass Ninja is here. He can do his thing without the rest of us having to work around him.
Low Key and I are here to get used to the pedal. We've both used blow hoses before, so it's not much of a stretch. It's easier, even, once we figure out how to attach the end of the hose to our pipes quickly and smoothly. We try to figure out if it's easier to help each other with this or if it's easier to do it ourselves. She likes me to help her. I don't like the sudden stop when I'm rolling the pipe; if I attach the piece myself, I can keep the whole thing rolling.
It's easy to deliver too much air, too. We learn to tap on the pedal.
I put one piece onto the floor and one into the annealer. I'm relieved at how much my hands have remembered. It's hot enough in here that I don't want to try anything fancy anyway. When my hands get sweaty I can't turn the pipe.
The guys in next shift, Tall Vase, Classmate's Partner, and Pumpkin Master, are waiting outside. I catch up with Classmate's Partner as he waits his turn.
II: I Needed This Day
"My father said if I got hooked on drugs it wouldn't be half as bad as this," says Old Man, who might not even be 20*. He's one of the new advanced students and I'm his partner for the morning. I got a text from LT1 at 6:00 last night and bailed on the Insane Bike Posse so that I could be here instead. It's the first Saturday I've taken to blow glass in nearly a year.
(*I found out later that he's a freshman. In high school.)
Outside it's sunny, clear, and cool. I have good music in my head. Pumpkin Master and Tall Vase are at the other bench. The glory hole is working. My little exercise piece from Thursday is out of the oven. I've been doing one-gather-one-reheats at the beginning of three semesters now. This is the best one I've done. It's even and -- gasp! -- on-center.
Old Man and I churn through our one-gather-one-reheat exercise. The goal is to make four each. We drop a few from cold punties, but we get them in eventually. For the rest of the class, we play.
I make a derpy little vase and a bowl to replace the off-center one Moxie has been drinking from on the bathroom sink. I've been promising him a better one for weeks. Old Man helps me with a cat. He makes a few vessels and a bunch of flowers. He learned how to make the flowers up at Corning. I made one there years ago and, until now, could not remember how I did it.
It's different with fewer people in here at once. Nobody is dropping by. There's room for us to move around. Not having to give my partner air means I can get out of the way and stand in the back of the classroom, by the fully-open back door. With the corrugated metal blind all the way up, it's as if we're working outside.
Everyone is complying with the mask rule and staying six feet apart. Nobody is complaining about it. I clean my hands with sanitizer or an alcohol wipe whenever I finish blowing. I put sanitizer on my hands before and after I use the gloves at the break-off table. I feel safe and relaxed.
Alchemy has his usual Saturday afternoon spot. As our shift comes to an end, I wait around for him, chatting with Our Instructor and Sage, who, along with Glass Ninja, always arrive far too early. With a limit of five people in the classroom at once, they move around in shifts until the morning people have cleared out.
Sage leaves, dropping our number back to four. Alchemy doesn't have a partner today, so he invites me to hang around as his assistant for a while.
The Insane Bike Posse texts me their middle fingers. I feel loved.
Alchemy grumbles his way through the new contraption, then opts for molding glass on a punty rod instead. He can bend glass in ways that the rest of us can't. He can turn a cylinder of clear glass into a bubble-filled marvel. He can twist and turn a blob of purple into a fascinating tangle of swirls. He can heap on a massive gather and pry it into the shape of a cup as if it were clay.
Between pieces we sit outside and talk. During one of his breaks he gives me a reducing purple and helps me make an orange cat with his color for the tail.
It's not just the masks and the wrist bands and the empty campus that are different. Something inside me is, too. I made what I made, I had a good time, and I feel no pressure. I'm just glad to be able to be back, doing this weird art-sport-nerd thing.
Glass-face is like bike-face, only you can't see it under my mask.
Someone put this cartoon on the door that leads from our classroom to the hallway. It's funny because it's true:
*****
"I needed this!" Sleepless says during a break. It's our first lab together. Our classmates are the other two new advanced students. One of them is animated, pleasant, and social. The other is nice enough, but he rarely talks. They're Jay and Silent Bob.
Sleepless and I have been texting each other since March. Now we get to see each other in person, under masks, six feet away. She's as giddy as I am about blowing glass again. Neither of us had realized how much we'd missed this until we'd walked into the classroom.
I've got my four one-gathers from Saturday. I'd played with the openings, putting divots in them or pulling them, so that I'd be able to pick them out of the inevitable infestation of tiny vessels.
The derpy little pitcher-thingie came out okay.
Moxie will like his bowl. It's bigger, and on-center.
The cats are all right. I need to make them bigger and longer. They've been getting short and round recently.
It's hot in here today. None of us is trying anything fancy.
We stand outside a lot, to cool off. There's a praying mantis hanging around the entrance.
With Sleepless I've made two wrapped cups. One should be good enough to be the replacement for the one in my office that broke.
I have an idea for a project. I play with cherry red frit and make a couple of sphere-like vessels. pushing in the top of the first and pulling out the top of the second. Spheres are easy shapes for me now, after having made so many ornaments. They're much easier for me to make than vases. They're the perfect shape for a 102-degree day.
Moxie likes his bowl.
When I pick up my Tuesday pieces during the Thursday class, I'm pleasantly surprised that I don't hate them all. In the before times, I would have hated them all for one reason or another. Now I see the mistakes and put them in perspective. I made these, and nobody can take that experience away from me.
If everyone here behaves, maybe we can make it all the way through the semester.
III: I Have An Idea
I need to make a coronavirus. If I make it like a bowl, I can stuff the opening with wrist bands. I need to make a floppy bowl to put the coronavirus in. I need to save all my wrist bands and spread them around inside the bowl. I need to call the end result "Pandemic."
I try to make a virus the first time on a Thursday night in the 8:45 slot. Classmate's Partner is the only other person signed up. He and Our Instructor bring me bits of a color I don't much like. This is my first try; I don't want to waste good color.
The bits are a fleshy purple that turns green when the glass is hot.
The final product is, well, ugly, but so is this pandemic.
The following Tuesday I try to make a floppy bowl. I'd only been successful once before, after a lot of failures. During the Semester of What The Fuck I made a few floppy things, but they got that way through my lack of control, not through deliberate action.
I try anyway, winding up with less of a bowl and more of a clam. My second attempt is worse, so I stop.
Instead, Sleepless brings me iris purple bits that I wrap onto a mix of cherry red and orange spheres. I'm trying to make ornaments that look like the sunrises I saw in Maine. These are a start, but the wraps are breaking off. They didn't anneal well to the ornament. I need to figure out another way to do this.
A sure sign that the glassblowing semester is underway is the slowly-populating window sill, where pieces sit, awaiting judgment.
The first of the wrapped cups, the less symmetric one, comes to work with me. The curves, by sheer coincidence, fit my hand perfectly.
I get another last-minute text to fill in on a Saturday morning, which is fine with me, because the forecast has rain in it, and Tom wants to do a route that I don't much like. So I ditch the Insane Bike Posse and fill in for Tall Vase. My partner is Pumpkin Master. Alchemy is here, too, working with Old Man.
I try a floppy bowl again. My spin-out is all wrong. I make a floppy hat.
Forget it, for now. I want to try the sunrise thing again, this time rolling the wrap into the glass and then blowing it out. The first try produces an ornament that is not quite spherical; maybe the colors didn't blow out at the same rate. It's hard to tell when the whole thing is hot. I try again, deciding at the last minute to make a cup instead. I won't know how the colors worked until they come out of the annealer.
Of course, the guys send me their fingers.
I'm watching Pumpkin Master make pumpkins, helping him with the stems when he needs me. He makes it look easy, so much less complicated than what All The Glass was doing last semester, and much more controlled than the way Sleepless and I had been approaching it.
He guides me through one, and then another. He's a good teacher. As soon as class is over, I go outside to write it all down:
The bowl is a bust. It's too small for the virus to fit into. The rest turned out okay. I like them, flaws and all.
Each floppy bowl I try is worse than the one before. I even try color, hoping that it'll make the glass softer. I do get a bowl out of it, but not floppy. I heat it again, shape it, heat it, and wind up with something that's neither floppy nor round. We'll see when it comes out of the oven.
It's another hot day in here. I've figured out that hands coated in sanitizer do not play well with sweat and punties when I'm trying to turn a rod for a spin-out. I switch to using my own alcohol wipes instead.
I also switch to pumpkins. They require less time in front of the glory hole, which is a tortuous place to be right now. I make some more ornaments too. I can do one in about five minutes. The hooks need work, but they're improving.
Yeah, no. Maybe I can give this one away.
I should just stop and get some help from the masters.
Even a cat is too much for a hot day.
The judgment window grows.
Thursday night finds me working with Pumpkin Master again. He's precise, which is exactly what I need in order to make another coronavirus. I use a piece of rod left over from the student starter pack, Canary Yellow, I think it's called. This time I keep the clear glass round and small. We have just enough yellow left for a hook. This is one heavy ornament.
IV: Some of the Old Mindset Starts to Slip In
It's class project week. I'm at the helm for Sleepless' idea of a smiling pumpkin. It's more of a smirk, and the stem position gives the impression of a pompadour.
We like it. One of my friends online says it looks like Elvis. "Thankyouverymuch," I reply, and we name him Elvis. I should give this to Sleepless; it was her idea.
An experiment with clear and gold doesn't quite work the way I'd hoped. It has a bad side
and a good side.
I thought I might try spinning out in fuchsia, but I changed my mind and wound up with a fishbowl sort of vase with an off-kilter top.
I'm trying to make at least one ornament per class.
I'm using black for the first time. This color is a bitch. It's goopy. It stretches and moves and stays hot longer than other colors. I'm having trouble controlling it. Several ornaments blow out on me. One survives, but it's not round.
This floppy failed so hard it became a straight bowl that wound up going straight into the re-melt can.
This one caved in on itself before I could pull it out of the glory hole. It looks like a bedpan. It's in the re-melt can now.
I made some blue pumpkins. I'm getting the bottoms too hot; they're losing their ridges.
This ornament turned out fun.
Another blue is a reducing blue, and it reacted with the opal I put on top.
Thursday rolls around and this time I ask for help. Tall Vase and Our Instructor pitch in with advice. Watch the opening size: don't make it too big. I have to get it hotter in the glory hole. Turn slower. Get it hotter. Get it out of control in there (my heart is racing). Now! Spin!
I mess that up a little, my hands bouncing the rod instead of turning it smoothly. But something comes out of it, off-kilter.
That's good, actually, because it looks like a lysed cell. I can fit the virus inside. I deliberately grind it down on an angle, accidentally putting a hole through the bottom. But that's okay; I can stuff some wrist bands in there.
The second try goes better.
"It takes a lot of practice," Our Instructor assures me. "I have a bunch of duds at home." Sure. They're probably all perfect.
I'm definitely getting frustrated. I can feel the anxiety creeping in, the sense that I have to get this right because other people in the class can do it. I can feel myself inching towards the same rut I was in when classes shut down last semester. I'm failing so often now that I'm knocking the bowls off the rod straight into the bucket. "Nope," I tell Sleepless each time.
Every so often I veer off course early. Working with Low Key, who says she'll guide me through a floppy bowl then doesn't, I fail and shape the glass into something resembling a sphere with a big lip. It goes into the re-melt bucket too.
I ask her to assist me with another coronavirus. It goes horribly. With years more experience than I have, she ought to have known how to bring me a consistent bit every time. I learn the hard way that none of us knows all the things, no matter how long we've been learning. In the end, our expertise comes down to what we want to do and what our partners ask us to do.
I fill in again on a Saturday morning. Alchemy and I are trading off Saturdays now, so that Old Man will always have a partner.
I fail to make a floppy bowl three times. By noon I have nothing in the annealer. I pick up a dark blue rod and dip it into a series of frits that should react with each other. I make a simple sphere that takes me ten minutes. I bang out an ornament in another five.
When I see it on Tuesday, I'm enchanted. It looks like a planet. I have to make more of these. The planet snaps me out of my funk. Forget the floppy bowl business. I want to play with colors.
V: Playing with Color
Ornaments are a good way to experiment with new colors, or to see what will react with what. It's not a perfect test, because the surface never gets as hot as it would if there were another gather of glass on top of it, and heat can change everything. If I get a reaction, even a little one, when I make an ornament, I know that something big will happen if I add heat.
Sleepless says she's the only one who likes Opal White. I've seen it a few times. It looked vague and milky to me. But I got a free sample with my latest glass order. I figured I'd try it on some ornaments first, as background.
Not bad!
"Psst!" I text Sleepless. "I like Opal White!"
"YES!" she replies. "CROSS OVER TO THE RIGHT SIDE OF LIFE!!!!"
"Haters gonna hate. More frit for us."
It gives a neat effect when I put it on last instead of first.
Two springs ago, I played with combining cherry red and narcissus rods. We have to put a clear glass collar between the pipe and the rod so that the next person won't be, as one of my classmates once put it, "blowing Froot Loops." In the before times, we'd get a small gather and keep the pipe in the furnace. Then we'd blow until the bubble burst, wait a few seconds, and go back to the bench to shape it into a clear, hollow collar. Now that we have to use our feet, we take a tiny gather and go back to the bench to hold a torch to the end of the pipe, sending air through until the bubble bursts. It took me a few tries to figure out the process without burning my fingers on flying shards of burst bubble glass remnants.
I load the yellow rod first, then the red, pulling the red up randomly around the yellow. I don't have a particular shape in mind. I wind up pulling the neck out on the first one. A blip on the lip looks intentional. It becomes a pitcher-vase-thingy. I make a pumpkin next.
VI: Embrace the Anarchy!
I'm working with Alchemy, finally. Sleepless is away from class today. I want to try a floppy bowl again. Alchemy minds the glory hole doors.
My spinout goes wrong, of course. I always start too early. The shape goes wonky.
"Nope."
I put it back in to see if I can get the sides to flop.
"Embrace the anarchy!" Alchemy commands.
I can't. I put it in the annealer, but when it comes out I throw it away.
I appeal to Our Instructor for help. He suggests I come to the Thursday class at 6:00, when he'll be demonstrating color to the new advanced students. He says he'll make a floppy bowl and I can watch.
"Deal!" I tell him.
When I get there, the videographer has set up. I try to stay out of the camera's range, but Our Instructor calls on me to assist him, first to clear the glass in the furnace of bubbles (it's called "raking," which I learned how to do from Glass Ninja), then to make a colored bit for the lip wrap he's going to put on the opening of his bowl. I also mind the glory hole doors for him.
Back in the before times, LT2 was nearly always in class to assist Our Instructor. Occasionally he'd ask Tiny's Daughter to assist. I figured I'd never rate, and anyway, I wouldn't want to be the one to screw up when asked to help. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and I'm the only one he's got in the room right now who knows how to do these things. I'm nervous but I prevail.
When it comes time for him to heat the piece in the glory hole and get it so hot that he feels as if he's losing control, I watch intently. Turns out I haven't been as far off as I thought; I've just pulled my pieces out too early, before they were sufficiently hot to move like thin liquid. My out-of-control, bouncy punty-spin doesn't help either.
He posts the video a week later. The one part I want to watch over and over again, the glory hole part, isn't on the video. The camera was still on the other side of the room, the piece in the glory hole out of view. Instead, we see him, with Old Man minding the door, and me behind him, staring intently into the heat. I do look kind of bad-ass in the video, though, with my wrap-around glassblowing shades and bandanna. Nobody will ever accuse me of looking feminine.
At 7:00 it's time to play. Tall Vase helps me try a floppy bowl. I make a stupid cold-punty mistake and it falls to the floor before I can open it up. He tells me to try again. I do, with some reactive colors. He assures me I'll flop a bowl tonight.
I almost do, but when I pull the piece out of the glory hole, I angle it up, and one of the sides collapses inwards. I go back to the bench to see what's up. Tall Vase cuts something inside; I can't quite see what he's doing. I go back to the glory hole. Our Instructor, who saw me fail, has left the room; he's doing midterm critiques with us in shifts (mine is next week). This time the opening is moving around like thin liquid. I pull the piece out, spinning furiously, until it goes flat, then drop the pipe to vertical. The sides flop inwards. We put it away. I bound into the classroom down the hall. "I did it! I did it!" Our Instructor grins. Tall Vase and Pumpkin Master have their crits now; Our Instructor lets me play by myself for a little bit. I make a planet and an ornament, and am failing on another ornament when he returns. With only two or three people per crit shift, it's not taking very long.
On Tuesday I try for a floppy bowl again, first thing, with a pale scrap color I bought cheap. It doesn't melt well into the clear glass. The bowl fails. Into the waste bucket it goes. Sleepless uses her Pumpkin Mix to make a goblet, but it winds up on the floor. Into the waste bucket it goes. Low Key, who is here to fill in for Silent Bob, lands her first piece on the cement as well. It all looks so pretty in the bucket.
Thursday's floppy bowl is out of the annealer. The piece that Tall Vase cut is sharpish, so unless I want to risk breaking the thing by sanding it down to make it safe for others, the bowl stays with me.
Here's the planet from the same night.
And the ornament, which shows how heat affects the color interactions:
This is the view from the classroom when the metal door is all the way up:
VI: Reds That Aren't Red
Thursday is my scheduled critique. I'm signed up with All the Glass and Low Key. Our styles are different, although Low Key does like to play with color.
I sort through my piles of clear glass failed floppy bowls for one that will fit the coronavirus ornament and look like a lysed cell. I pick the one that's off-center with the hole in the bottom.
Right now, this is the best I can do with my silly idea.
"Pandemic." It's craptacular. I'm going to bring it in anyway.
On Tuesday I'd played with reds and oranges. I have a new color, Vermillion, that, as frit, is an opaque, slightly orange, red. When I heated it, the glass turned blue, sending me and Sleepless into some confusion about what color vermillion really is. I was almost positive it's red, but maybe it's green? She looked it up. It's red.
I was making a pumpkin out of it. We used orange for the stem, figuring it would be a good match with the red.
Well, weren't we wrong! When I take it out of the cabinet, the only way I know it's mine is because of the spikes on the stem, where the tool I was using stuck to the glass. The whole pumpkin appears orange, albeit several shades of it. The body is a pinkish-orange, not at all what either one of us expected. I'll have to mess with this color some more.
Sleepless and I were experimenting with putting wraps on ornaments to figure out how to keep the wraps from falling off. I'd figured an orange ornament with a vermillion wrap would look cool. It doesn't.
Rolling the wrap in before blowing the ornament into a sphere melds the two colors almost completely. So much for that.
Of all the colors in my now too-heavy bag, Cherry Red from Gaffer is my favorite. The rod I got from them a year or so ago is almost gone. Every piece I've made from it has come out in a deep, bright, transparent red, like a Charms lollipop. Before this rod runs out, I wanted to get more, so I went online to find that Gaffer had reformulated. The rod that I wound up with came to me looking yellow. Uh oh.
What came out of it is still red, but it's not the same red, I think. I bring the cup to crit, hoping for some answers.
I'd also bought a deeper red, called Garnet. The small pumpkin I made from it isn't blown out enough, but when I hold it to the light, I like the color.
So, here are my reds that aren't red:
VII: Mid-Term Critique
I'm signed up to blow glass from 7:00 to 8:45, and then to to crit at 8:45. This is a logistical hassle. I have my usual rolling toolbox full of glass frit and rods and supplies, a bag to carry Tuesday's glass home in, and a suitcase full of pieces I'm bringing to crit. I leave the suitcase in the car, which means I have to scramble to clean up, drop the supplies in the car, get the suitcase, and go back to class to set up. I almost get back in time.
The three of us set up at tables far apart from each other. What each of us is doing doesn't overlap at all with what the others are working on. All The Glass is, as usual, displaying gargantuan objects, not pumpkins nor fish this time, but clear pieces that have a Victorian air to them. This leads to Our Instructor telling us that the next batch of clear cullet is from a different supplier. "It's supposed to stay hotter longer," he says. "We'll be switching over in a couple of weeks, so if you have anything in clear that you want to recycle, do it now." I have a lot.
Low Key has been playing with thin, solid-color canes she bought online, cutting them and carefully placing them in molds so she can pick them up in an even spread. I like it when they don't quite stay straight because the canes are white inside, and the colors on the outside start to spread. Our Instructor and All The Glass have ideas about how she can lay out the cane. I learn about a new tool we have in the classroom.
As for me, "Pandemic" requires a bit of explaining, which isn't what I was hoping for. We spend more time discussing the cherry red rod, and how, if you like a color, you should get a lot of it, because it'll never be the same the next time around. "Reds are tricky," Our Instructor says. "It depends on how thin you blow them out." Maybe that's it. This cup is thinner than anything I've made with Cherry Red before.
They like the planets.
About the floppy bowl, Our Instructor tells me again that, to do this right, I'll need a lot of practice. All The Glass likes the colors.
At home, I place the red cup next to the red and yellow pieces I made a few weeks ago. They're all on the window sill. In the yellowish light of the room at night, they don't seem as different as I thought they were. In the morning, in diffuse sunlight, I can see where the cup grades from the rich red I'd hoped for to a more yellow hue where the glass is thinner. Well, I have a whole rod of this stuff. I'm going back in two days to work with Old Man. I'll use it again and see what happens.
As for the floppy bowls, I'll try again, but I'm not going to let it take me over.
VIII: What's Next
We made it halfway through the semester without getting shut down. In the rest of the country, SARS-CoV2 is raging again. We're a country that can't pass the marshmallow test. Impatience, selfishness, and willful ignorance has led to this. I started this semester treating each class as if it were the last. I'm going to keep doing that.
As long as the college stays open, I'll continue to try flopping bowls. I'll make ornaments for sure, because they're fast and easy, and I can give them away. I'll play with color, of course. And I want to make a giant, clear bowl where I can put all the ornaments I plan to keep.
