"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different."
-- Kurt Vonnegut
I:
Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and and Over and Prelude
"Can you make me some pendant lamps?"
"Um, maybe?"
Mighty Mike was asking me over Zoom, in front of the rest of the Hill Slugs, on one of our regular Friday night calls in January.
"I'll need a project," I said. Covid-19 had spiked again after stupid people did stupid things over Thanksgiving. Our semester would be starting late because of it.
"No rush," he said.
"That's one of my favorite shapes. I just don't know if I can make the same thing over and over again."
"They don't all have to be the same." Well that's good, 'cause they won't be.
Enrollment was way down. There were 14 of us and 2 beginners.
I landed on Monday evenings with Sleepless and a beginner. The fourth slot was open. A lot of slots were open. Four classmates had no permanent partners; two of them were the only ones assigned to their time slots.
I had vacation days to burn and signed up for extra Tuesday afternoons with Jay, filling one of three empty slots for that time and guaranteeing him somebody to work with.
Thursday nights were, the official class nights. In the before times, there would be a dozen of us, scrambling to sign up on the white board with a near-dry marker, hoping that the four people signed up before us would leave us some time before Our Instructor kicked us all out. Now it was much simpler: the eight of us who bothered to check our college email would be the ones to sign up online for one of eight spots.
Long story short, there was a lot of bench time. I was taking home so much glass that I didn't have time to do more than take pictures. There was no single story taking shape; there were many, and they were happening all at once.
II:
Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Warmup
Jack had given me a student starter pack of reducing colors for Christmas, and a college friend had sent me a whole kilogram of metallic cobalt blue powder. I started off with those to get my hands back. Sleepless fired up the big propane torch to give everything a silvery sheen.
The blue-green mix was a winner.
I'm still not sure about the reactive yellow mix. Perhaps they just aren't my colors.
The lilac red came out neither red nor shiny.
I made a cobalt blue orb that was more silvery when we put it in the annealer than when it came out.
I made a giant ornament from the same blue and the same thing happened. The crease running through it was a happy accident, a mistake I didn't smooth out. Early-semester pieces are like that.
I thought I'd try one of the two-color pieces I was making at the end of last semester. Over the break I forgot how to center my punties. This one took some grinding down to set it straight.
Other attempts were unsalvageable.
One of my new colors was called "Moody Blue." The frit is a pale blue. But as I was working it into a cup, Sleepless said, "It looks yellow."
And that's how it came out. Under the classroom's mercury vapor lamps, it was yellow with a vague hint of pea green.
Perplexed, I took more pictures at home, under warm LED light. Definitely not blue.
Aha!
I brought it to work, where it sits on my office window sill, looking very not blue.
III:
Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Ornaments
On more complicated pieces I was messing up. A lot. My jack lines were too shallow and the pieces wouldn't break from the pipe. My punties were too hot and would slide around. Every piece was off-center.
"I think I'm getting worse," I complained one Thursday night.
"It happens," Our Instructor said. He helped me figure out that my progressive lenses were distorting my aim just enough to throw things off. "I always aim a quarter inch high," he said. "You'll figure it out."
I decided that I was too nervous on Thursday nights, with Our Instructor there, to do anything more than make cats and ornaments. Old Man was thinking the same way. It was orbs for him, giant ornaments for me, flowers for him, small ornaments for me. And the occasional cat.
When I wasn't busy dropping pieces off the punty or putting some wobbly thing into the annealer, I consoled myself by making ornaments with whatever colors I had out that day.
I mixed some of the new reactive colors together for a few days.
This color is called Silver Green. It has a bluish tint and doesn't stay reduced in our annealer.
I put the strange Moody Blue into the mix to see what would happen. Not much. Not blue.
I mixed Silver Green with something. Maybe Alchemy's secret sauce?
More Silver Green, denser and smaller:
I don't even remember:
The starter pack included a color called "Silver Clear." It's lumpy and, as far as I can tell, doesn't do much. At the end of the semester, Our Instructor would suggest I mix it with reds to see it react.
Sometimes I missed, ending up with an oblong shape.
Sleepless makes good optic mold ornaments. I don't.
When I counted 18 ornaments at home and at work, I decided the ones at home needed to go outside. I spent an hour one afternoon screwing hooks into the screened porch. I put in fifteen hooks and hung ornaments from nine. By the end of the semester, all of them were occupied.
Lilac Red is meh.
It was spring. I was in a purple and green mood. It didn't translate well.
Why was my Brilliant Yellow coming out orange? Because at some point last semester, I accidentally mixed the frits. Derp!
The first time I dared thread on a Thursday night, I made an ornament in order to avoid a punty error in front of Our Instructor.
I didn't mean to make a camouflage ornament.
I made one with two rods.
And another with one rod.
And one with smashed up bits of a Royal Purple cup that had been in our bathroom until Glooskap decided to knock it into the sink.
I'm still not liking this yellow mix.
Sometimes when I make giant ornaments, I don't close the top enough. When I put the glass for the hook on, some of it falls down into the ornament and forms a bubble, an ornament within an ornament.
One day, with All the Glass, I made a giant optic mold vase that looked like a cross between a cornucopia and a gramophone. It was perfect for all the ornaments I'd been churning out.
I decided that this one would need sand-blasting.
Classmate's Partner (I need a better pseudonym for him) suggested that I use poster putty. It was a good idea. I drew flowers with it.
Another miss. I was forgetting how to make them round.
This one cracked when I leaned it against the cats for a photo.
I had a stray piece of green aventurine rod. When I made the jack like, I accidentally included some of the clear collar. We put clear between rod and pipe to prevent the next person from, as one of my first semester classmates called it, "blowing Froot Loops."
With a flash or in bright light, aventurine sparkles.
There was a sale on rods at one of the big suppliers. I bought Bronze, not sure how brown it would be. As an ornament, the color is brownish-green.
I went back to mixing reactive colors. They blew out weirdly here, leaving one side nearly clear.
Hanging on the porch, the uneven color gives it depth as light passes through the clearer side.
I mixed the metallic cobalt blue with enamel white and hit the thing with a torch before putting it in the annealer. It came out looking burnt.
Then I went off and focused on threading and vases. When I tried to make ornaments again, I really screwed the pooch. The tiny one has a gaping hole under the hook. The bottom one is a strawberry.
I mixed Hyacinth and Enamel White. Still not round. What was I doing wrong?
I was getting closer sometimes.
And then:
Aha! It's in the setup! Square off the first gather!
It was the penultimate day of class. I made a large ornament with a bad hook and ground it off.
Only a little inner bubble remained. This one, I decided, would to to Tom at his new house.
I made an orb for my yard.
With dozens of small ornaments and fifteen large ones, I've decided that any friend who sets foot in our house will have to leave with one or the other.
IV:
Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Lampshades
Meanwhile, at the end of February, I started in on the lampshades. Working with clear glass, I tried out shapes. I made a small one first.
My plan was to sand-blast a pattern into it so that the light would shine through mostly softened.
Mighty Mike liked the shape so I tried for something bigger, proving in the process that I cannot make the same shape twice.
"I like the blue one," Mighty Mike wrote, choosing his lampshade colors. He was looking at the lopsided, two-color vessel I'd made on Election Night, the one that was cobalt blue and sky blue. Well, I had plenty of cobalt blue to play with now, and a decent amount of sky blue frit to go along with it.
I got to work figuring out how to replicate a pattern. I coated my first gather in several layers of cobalt powder, then ran it through the sky blue frit, melted it in, and pulled at it with tweezers to mix the frits together. I fished out the tiny #4 block to reshape the mess, put a little air into it, and gathered more glass over the whole thing.
Next came the shaping. I was still having jack line and punty problems, and I lost more than a few before they came close to the annealer.
"He wants three," I told Our Instructor, who has made many a lampshade in his time.
"Make six," he advised.
The story of the lampshades is also the story of me getting vaccinated.
I had severe vaccine envy. Although I'd managed to keep my sanity intact all through the lockdown and beyond, when Jack and half of my friends had received their jab and I still didn't qualify, I lost it. Through sheer luck, a friend put me on a leftover dose list and told me about it afterwards; a day later I had a needle in my shoulder. That was March 3.
The fog began to lift.
Between March 4 and March 16, I made a dozen lampshades. No two were alike. Some were close. All were small, and thick, and heavy.
They were all a little off-center, because of course they were. I didn't bother to grind them down. We'd be drilling a hole through the bottom for the bulb and the cord anyway.
Some were obviously not going to make the final cut. I'd show them all to Mighty Mike and let him decide. The rest I could grind down and turn into cups.
I posed them with a ruler so he could figure out what fixture to get. It was down to two. One had a brushed aluminum cap and a wide hole to hold a bulb nearly as wide as the fixture. If I'd been able to make the base narrower and tapered, and do it consistently, that might have been the way to go. But I didn't, so we chose the smaller fixture, which would require a half-inch hole and hold a small LED bulb.
I sent him a picture of the lampshades by day so he could get an idea of how light might pass through them.
At night, I stuck a small LED underneath the top. Lit from inside, they looked completely different.
As I made more, I got better at replicating the shape.
Finally, I had seven contenders.
During a bike ride in the flatlands, I suggested to Mighty Mike that he could stop by on his way home to take a look at the lampshades in person. I hammered home on my bike and got cleaned up while he took his time and grabbed some lunch on his drive over. By the time he arrived, I had them all on the front step.
"I like them all," he said. I couldn't fathom why. I was still seeing them as a class project to be inspected by Our Instructor. Glass looks different when it's out in the real world. I know that, but I can't see that during the semester.
Mighty Mike ordered diamond drill bits.
We talked about it on one of our Friday night Zoom sessions. Most of the Hill Slugs, it turns out, have some sort of shop work under their belts. I'd been asking Our Instructor and classmates, too, because some of them were shop teachers and contractors in real life. Everyone in class said to use water and to go slowly.
Tom, who had once drilled holes in glass bricks to make holiday lights as gifts, had the brilliant idea of putting the glass into a bucket of dirt to keep it steady.
I asked if we could wait until I was on the other side of my second vaccine before we would attempt to put holes in the glass.
It was April 21, two days after my two-week incubation period after my second vaccine, that Mike, Tom, and I got together. Mike had been vaccinated early. Tom and his wife were several days past their second shots. Tom has a woodworking shop in his basement. We went down there.
Mike sorted through the lampshades, choosing the ones he liked best, and a handful of spares.
I'd brought a couple of dud pieces with me to practice on. Tom went first. Then Mike tried.
While the piece was being drilled, a second person would stand by with a spray bottle of water.
I gave it a try, and it turned out I was pretty good at it. The trick was to start slowly and gently, then speed up as the bit settled into the glass, never going too fast or letting the glass get dry.
Tom worked the spray bottle.
We drilled through six, the wet glass powder drying on the surface to make all of them look a right mess.
I took the other four home. Three of them wound up in our master bathroom, holding various bathroom things and matching the cobalt blue glass sink.
V:
Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Marbles
Early in the semester, I thought I might want to try making marbles. Our Instructor had his own tools that he let me use on Thursday nights. It was more effort than it was worth, considering how much practice it would take just to get it round, only to still have to sand the breakoff point down to optical clarity afterwards, a process that takes hours at the grinder. I made a few clear, almost-round blobs.
I played with trapping a bubble.
I added color, too much and too dark. Then I dropped it while I was sanding the bottom down. It skittered across the spinning disc of sandpaper. I wound up with a flourish, thus:
And little satellites:
Why not make paperweights instead?
VI:
Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Paperweights
I used some spare cane to draw on a little gather on a punty. It was random.
Then I watched a video on YouTube. It was all of two minutes, with all the parts I needed to see cut out. I guessed, and wound up with something approximating what I'd seen, only much worse.
Being random on Thursday nights was fun. Too bad this one is so tilted. Keeping a gather of glass centered on a punty is much more difficult than keeping a gather centered on a pipe.
I ended up throwing this one away.
I rolled a gather in millefiori.
I had some thicker canes I tried drawing with. It was bad. I threw this paperweight out.
The two-tree trapped bubble pattern was fun to make. I dug out the yellow mix again, finally finding a good use for it.
Some went better than others.
I was still having trouble keeping the glass centered.
But I was getting better:
This one's a miss:
At the end of one class, I trapped a bubble inside the first gather, gathered over it, and trapped another bubble.
When the glass was hot, I couldn't see if I'd managed to trap a bubble inside. Only when it came out of the annealer did I see how well it had worked. The bottom bubble looked like a mirror. From then on, I tried trapping bubbles. None looked as good as the first one.
On the last day of class, Our Instructor gave me a suggestion for trapping bubbles. I'll try again in the fall.
VII:
Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Cats
I made few early on. Old Man and Jay assisted me. One afternoon, I opened the cabinet where all of our finished work goes, and found it to be full of cats, none of them mine. Those punks.
My cats look like mine. It's the ears.
They usually come off the pipe crooked, with bits of the base sticking out. I have to grind them down.
I bought a rod of Royal Purple cheap. I don't understand this color. It's white. It's pink.
And it's purple inside, where nobody can see it.
Old Man started making cats on the punty. He made his all one color. I asked if I could make one. Working with him, I went for two colors.
Old Man cats are weensy.
It was spring. It was time for cats to roll in flowers.
I made one with glow-in-the-dark frit.
In the end, I had a dozen ready to sell for charity, to benefit the group who brought us Glooskap.
VIII:
Moderna
About the vaccine: My second shot was on a Monday, four hours before class. Three hours after the shot, I felt a little dizzy. I went to class anyway. This might not be a good idea, I thought, because I might fumble and hurt someone. On the other hand, I might be relaxed and finally have a really good night.
I had a really good night.
I felt stoned, loopy, giddy. All The Glass suggested I try threading, and I went for it.
He suggested I use the big mold. I picked up a Royal Purple rod and went for it.
It ended up being several colors of purple.
I rolled some glass in millefiori and made cats.
Sleepless and I were joking around. I don't remember anything we said except that she had Mango Orange frit and it was making me hungry for mangoes.
I'd known better than to sign up for Tuesday that week; instead, Jay and I jumped into Wednesday's wide-open afternoon slot and blew glass with Low Key. I knew I was back to normal because I messed nearly everything up and threw most of what I made away.
I realized that it's all in my head, of course, and I decided that from then on I'd go for big stuff on Thursdays again.
IX:
Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Rods
Rods are a different beast from frit. Rods give you a solid color. If you're really good, you can blow a piece out from a rod to get a gradient of color. I'm not really good. I'm lucky if the color and the clear glass I put over it move in the same direction.
So, one afternoon during the two-week post-second-shot incubation, I cut six slices of rod and put them in the warming oven. It would be all rods all day until I figured it out.
I used scraps left over from the student rod kit. I flubbed a vase with a slice of Blue Jade.
A tiny piece of some sort of vase became a tiny cup perfect for the bathroom. It could replace the one Glooskap broke.
I made another tiny cup from Hot Pink. I put it in the annealer before the top had sufficiently cooled.
It went sideways. It would be perfect for holding toothbrushes in the bathroom.
By the third piece, a slice of Royal Purple, I'd figured out that my slices were too small.
I was getting bored with picking up rods, so I picked up the last two slices in succession and made an ornament.
The next day I did the same thing, this time with a few slices of bronze.
The ornament worked well.
I tried playing with jack lines in order to figure out how to make a vase. I wound up with this thing, whatever it is:
The next one eventually found its way to the trash.
I tried threading twice too. All The Glass saved a piece of thread because, with the glass still hot, neither of us had any idea what bronze would look like in the end. The scrap of thread would help us figure it out. I ground the bottom down so it could stand on its own.
Classmate's Partner wanted a slice of Royal Purple, and gave me a piece of Gold Ruby in exchange. The piece seemed big, but as soon as I used it I realized it was the perfect size. I made a drinking glass from it.
X:
Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Vases
A year ago I tried to make vases by elongating the neck when the piece was on the punty. I was never satisfied with how it went. The process requires pulling on the neck, generating a gob of glass at the very top that either has to be cut off or become part of the piece. Cutting never worked well for me; it would distort the shape I'd been trying to make. I'd leave the gob there, which would throw off the proportions. We got shut down halfway through the semester, and that was that for vases.
When Glass Ninja filled the extra Monday night slot, I watched him pull necks while the piece was still on the pipe. I thought maybe I should try that. I watched Glass Ninja and I watched a tutorial video from one of the guest artists who had done a demo for the class in the before times.
I had already made a vase by accident, when All The Glass suggested I try using the large optic mold to make lampshades. It was too much glass for that, and I'd sort of lost control of the top. I spun it out into something with a top as wide as the piece was tall. This was pretty much the opposite of the vase shape I wanted to make.
The next time Glass Ninja showed up, I asked him to show me. He did, and I tried three times. Each one failed.
"Remember, I've done over 250 of these," he said.
"Three down, 247 to go," I replied.
I tried a few more times. I cheated and pulled the neck when it was on the punty, getting my traditional gob of glass at the top.
I focused on pulling on the pipe with one gather, just to get the feel for it. I made two dopey vases this way. I cracked the bottom off one of them when I released it from the punty. After I took pictures, I sent them to the re-melt bucket.
I gave up and played with making tiny necks on the punty instead.
I spent the next few weeks grinding them down, a few minutes at a time, until I had a pair of soap dishes.
Then I went back to pulling necks. I got two clear ones into the annealer.
I'm glad I took a picture, because I never saw them again. Both beginner students denied having seen them, even though the beginner in my class had made a similar thing on the same day.
What's the point of working in clear if the clear disappears?
I goofed around with jack lines and made an off-kilter thing that wound up in the trash.
A drawing failure almost turned into a flattened vase, but the two blues moved independently of the clear and the shape was so far off that I tossed the thing. This was two days after my second shot, and I knew I was back to normal because nothing I made that day was worth keeping.
Once more with the off-center neck, this time paired with a squashed form, that I turned into a pitcher for lack of anything better to do with it.
It dribbles on itself. It's useless.
We saw this one before, in the section about rods.
And again, throwing the neck off-center:
More likely, these pieces were off-center to begin with, and the opening follows the form.
As I was mucking around with rods, I played with jack lines and swinging. I got a shape that's on its way to becoming a vase but isn't sure what to do next.
It was April 21, a Wednesday, two days after I reached full immunity. I was going to get together with Tom and Mike in the evening to drill lampshades.
I decided to try pulling necks again, this time using color, so nobody would mistake it for theirs. I chose Cherry Red frit that goes on clear so that I could see what I was doing.
Following Glass Ninja's instructions and the video I'd watched two more times, I managed a little neck, maybe an inch or two, and a rounded bottom. I was happy.
The following Monday, I made one with a new red frit mix, and another with a red-white mix.
The next Monday, there were cherry blossoms on the floor of the classroom. I made more vases, and at the end of the night, swept the petals to the outside.
I'd mixed cobalt blue with white, and they'd reacted with each other:
Moody Blue, when mixed with white, was still not blue:
This is the reactive silver mix and champagne:
This is the reactive silver mix with white:
I hadn't meant to use both red frit mixes together, but that's what I wound up doing:
Saturday morning was cool and sunny.
There were cherry blossoms on the floor.
I have some frit, Royal Purple, that looks like cherry blossoms on the floor.
The first one fell off the punty into the water bucket. With not much time left, I tried again. The top was so long that I was having trouble controlling it. Pumpkin Master helped me wrestle it back to something closer to centered.
In biology, there's a concept called runaway evolution. That's what was going on here. I needed to pull back on the pulled necks. Maybe not so much swinging next time.
The necks got smaller. I even nearly made the shape I'd been chasing for a year (below, middle), before I found myself forgetting how to make the rounded bottom.
Almost there.
Lost it.
I now had seventeen vases. They sat on the Window Sill of Judgment in chronological order, their neck heights marking a bell curve.
We were down to the final week of class now. I'd have three chances to get the shape back to where I wanted it.
Not quite:
Not at all. The color scheme was a friend's idea. I gave this vase to her.
I had one last chance. I went for the cherry blossoms again.
Close enough for now.
XI:
Over and Over and Over and Over and Threading
Our Instuctor defines getting threading right as applying the thread evenly and all the way down the piece.
I define success as not dropping the piece on the floor.
Thursday nights became threading instruction nights with either All the Glass or Classmate's partner. Bringing the thread to the piece is the most challenging part, so I made sure that I was the one doing that. I have a few pieces from last year where the threads look perfect; that's because I was the one turning the pipe and Thread Master was the one bringing the thread.
The first one was on vaccine Monday with All the Glass.
Three days later, on Thursday, I tried again. Classmate's Partner and I didn't get the thread all the way down, and I was too afraid of losing the piece, so I did an end-run around the punty by making a giant ornament. It weighs a ton, but at least it's in one piece.
I make this shape when I'm feeling insecure (which is most of the time). Get it onto the punty, open it a little, and put it away before anything bad happens.
Use a light background color, like white or off-white, and a dark thread for contrast.
Don't pull to hard on the thread or you'll get a stripe.
Keep it centered. Derp.
The piece started to move a little while I was threading, and the thread went on off-center. I like the effect.
Glow Green works as a background color too:
I was starting to feel a little more confident and opened the vessel wider.
It was time to combine skills.
XII: Over and Over and Over and Threaded Vases
Aventurine is stiff and brittle. It also sparkles. I wanted to thread with it. And I wanted to make a threaded vase. I had Old Gold aventurine frit for the thread.
It was Thursday, and I was working with All the Glass. With Our Instructor watching, we failed from the start. There was competition at the furnace and glory hole, so All the Glass had to wait too long to heat the base before I put the thread on. The glass was too cold when I got there, and aventurine being what it is, it didn't stick to the glass beneath it. I took what did stick as success and went on to shape the vase.
I got all the way to the end and decided that I wanted one more reheat to shape the opening a little bit better.
It fell off the punty into the bucket.
At least it sparkled.
"I hate aventurine," Our Instructor said. In his mind, I'd messed up the minute I'd picked my colors.
Classmate's Partner and Old Man saw the whole thing. That's when Classmate's Partner took pity on me and offered me his Saturday slot.
I went over to the sander to grind down some vases and lick my wounds while All the Glass set up his piece.
"It's a disappointment, but it's not a failure," Our Instructor said. "You learned a lot tonight."
"I saved you this," he said, placing a curlicue of thread in front of me. It was the piece that didn't stick to the base. I put it in the display cabinet when I got home.
XIII:
Over and Over and Redemption
It was the cherry blossom morning.
Having learned my lesson about frit, I placed two rods in the warmer for threads. I got right to it, setting up the base while Pumpkin Master warmed the rod, and trading off with him so that I could practice shaping it into a hot point.
The threading worked smoothly, top to bottom. I'd only been pulling in one direction, towards me, and by now I was getting pretty fast at it.
I shaped the glass into the long-neck vase, centered it on the punty, opened it up, put it away, and exhaled.
When it was my turn, I did it again.
Twice was enough. I had cherry blossoms on my mind.
When Monday rolled around and All the Glass was there, I was feeling cocky. "Let's try the aventurine again," I said. "If it works, we can show Our Instructor that there's a use for aventurine after all. If it doesn't, he never has to see it."
He saw it.
I tried threading in two directions. At the time, we could see the thread against the base. I had mixed Copper Ruby Light with Silver Clear, on Our Instructor's recommendation. The thread, I thought, was black.
It wasn't. It was green, and I'd put too much Copper Ruby on. "I can see the texture," Our Instructor said. That's all that's left of the threading.
This was a Thursday night thread miss.
It was around now that I forgot how to make the shape I'd been making successfully seventeen times. On the other hand, when Jay saw it, he said, "That's sick!" So I guess it's okay.
XIV:
Over
We had a final critique. I was paired with Grace and LT2 on the same night as the last chance to blow glass until September. I made a few ornaments and got to critique late.
With viral cases dropping, we're not sure if we'll be needing to wear masks in the fall. One thing is for sure, though: I'm never putting my mouth on a pipe again.
Over two Covid semesters, before entering the classroom, we had to check in with campus security and get a wristband. I saved every one.
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