All the Tiny Things
27 March 2022
The classroom now has a yellow brick road leading from the benches to Our Instructor's cabinet. One of the beginners, Rose, painted it for him after he griped about needing a clear path to his cabinet. As a campus security worker, she has keys to the building and sneaked in on a Sunday morning to surprise him.
A month later, it's trampled, dirty, and already fading. Our Instructor is retiring at the end of this term anyway.
I'm still forcing myself to make one feathered piece each class period. Some do not go well, like this bulging vase. It has one bad side and three good ones.
I was ready to saw off the bulge when one of my friends said she wanted it. I mailed it to her for free.
I'm still making spiral floppy bowls too. Sometimes I leave the outside clear.
Sometimes I try working with rods. This one is a reducing purple. I flubbed the flop and made a hat-bowl instead. We "hit it with the big torch," as we say, and the inside went all shimmery.
The outside is still purple.
I totally screwed up the top on this vase. It was at the end of the night, and my partner put the tools away before I was finished with them. I gave up, pulled one side down for a lip, and ended up with an opening so small that water only goes in and out one drop at a time. I was ready to toss it but my partner said she liked it. The vase went home with her. No love lost here.
Meanwhile, outside, we had some freezing rain. It coated the outdoor glass in a pleasing manner.
Icicles dripped from the lips.
The ten heads of Saint Vitreous were coated with ice too.
As were the teetering orbs I'd mounted on a piece of bottle tree removed from another stand and shoved into the frozen ground weeks before.
Sometimes I swing by the classroom on Saturday afternoons to pick up Thursday's work. It's never fun to fail in front of Our Instructor, which I'd done spectacularly two days before. At least the sunlight helped turn the mess into art.
I did better with feathering the next week. It's getting easier to make straight lines.
But I still miss hitting the bottom on my away-pulls.
One feather, one floppy, this one in a cheerful Canary Yellow:
And another floppy fail. Sometimes I spend so long trying to get the thing into round that all the heat goes out of it and it's not going to flop. I'm building a collection of plates.
I still don't have total control over the neck length when I try to make vases, but I'm getting better.
Here's a Tuesday's worth of work:
We had a good sunset one weekend evening. The only place to sort of see it is from our backyard.
Last semester, I made a vase for a friend who liked the autumn color combination I was keeping for myself. She said she liked it, but I could tell she was a little disappointed. So was I. Most of the color wound up on the underside. So I made her a new one that we were both happy with. I sent it to her, along with the bulging vase she rescued from my scorn.
Friends send me photos of my glass out in the real world:
One Thursday in early March, we had frost. Saint Vitreous was covered in it.
Ice droplets hung from the branch above one of the many heads:
The vases were frosted too.
Inspired by a colleague's scarf, I feathered in Opal Dark Green and Gold Ruby Extra:
And then I flubbed a spiral floppy:
So I tried again, and failed again, as one side caved in on itself.
Dang.
I've made two ornaments so far this semester, both as color tests. This one, in Coffee Brown, wasn't quite round, but was one of my partner's favorite colors. I sent it home with her.
One of my friends is obsessed with the James Webb telescope. I had an idea. It would involve hexagonal stickers and sand-blasting.
On a rainy day, this was the Window Sill of Judgment:
The ornaments have already been judged. They get to stay where they are. The rest, who knows? Glassblowing is an adventure, and I never know how the story is going to end.
There were many rainy weekends in March. I ordered a Dremel tool and some diamond-tipped bits. A tiny hole transformed an early-semester floppy fail into a wall hanging.
The rain turned to snow, and with it came high winds. It was too much for the teetering orbs.
One of them had smashed itself to pieces.
No biggie. I could make another one in about ten minutes.
But first, feather.
And flop. I almost missed with this one.
Early on, I'd hit the side of the furnace, putting divots in the white coating. They ended up looking like bubbles on the inside. This would never pass muster in the midterm critique.
Try again, fail again. One more plate for the pile.
The spiral is on the underside. Useless.
I made another gold-topped orb in case the first one didn't work out.
I made an orb to replace the one that shattered.
Using tape, poster putty, and hexagonal stickers (you can get anything on Amazon, apparently), I marked off the area I wanted to sand blast. The result wasn't as shiny as I'd hoped, but as a first pass at a sort of James Webb telescope pattern, it would do.
It was a Wednesday afternoon and I was using up a half-day of vacation time to work with Rose. She'd already been working in the morning session. By the time I got there, she was exhausted. She kept telling me to make something else whenever I said, "Your turn." I did coax her to make something, eventually.
The first thing I did was to use up a baggie of miscellaneous rod chunks I'd collected over the years. Too small to be used for anything else, they were perfect for a random vase. I didn't even know what colors I was rolling the clear glass in until the vase came out of the annealer.
Hmm. A flower, maybe?
The proportions on the second vase I tried were a little off.
I made a giant ornament out of two reactive mixes and hit it with the big torch. Shiny!
The friend I keep sending vases to asked me to make her a shallow bowl. I'm useless when it comes to work on command. This one happened, though, and she liked it enough for me to send it off.
I was glad to mail it across the state. Our Instructor dislikes hat bowls.
He also dislikes four-flop bowls, so I was relieved when the Ultramarine spiral bowl gave me seven flops. When I posted a photo online, one of my biking buddies said he'd buy it. I replied that it wouldn't be for sale, at least not yet.
For now, it would sit on a Shelf of Judgment, only to be sold if it were to to be nudged off by something better.
Tall Vase texted me a video of the class project fish we made. He'd put it in a stream.
The ground had thawed enough for me to move the orb stake to a less exposed area and get the base deep into the soil. I put the replacement orb on top and waited for the next wind storm.
A forecast for Saturday rain kept us ride leaders from listing anything, and then we woke to sunny skies. I was puttering around the house in my biking clothes, trying to decide where I wanted to go, when a text came through from class. They needed someone to fill in for Alchemy. I changed into old jeans and a t-shirt.
To mount her outdoor glass sculptures, my friend in Massachusetts glues little, flat-sided liquor bottles to the back of the sculpture and mounts the bottle on a garden stake. She gets her bottles at thrift stores and flea markets, which we don't have much of around here. I told her I can get a dozen for about $20 from Amazon. She suggested I try to make them myself.
I honestly hadn't even thought of that. Working that small is difficult. Our classroom isn't set up for it. The furnace and glory hole door thickness is about as big as the bottle would be, and the glass, being so small, would lose half its heat on my walk from the glory hole back to the bench. But I told her I'd give it a go.
In seven tries, I tossed two, put five in the annealer, and kept three of them. The first one I made was the best shape, but I didn't flatten the sides. The last two were simpler, with one flattened side. They were about three inches tall at the most.
And then we were less than a week away from our midterm.
I found myself focusing on spiral floppies. My success rate was improving a little bit.
But only a little bit.
At the same time, I was burning out on feathering. I think my pieces were getting worse. When I tried using a purple rod under black, I didn't feel like feathering in both directions. I went at it sort of slanted, so I twisted the whole thing to accentuate it. The shape went weird on me.
Alchemy said he liked it. I sent it home with him.
I shifted my focus to making more tiny vases, this time in color. Mission creep had set in; I was no longer trying to make flat-sided vessels to glue to the back of plates. Now I was trying to make vases and bowls with one little gather.
Working this small was challenging. I had to teach myself pretty much from scratch. The results weren't always pleasing.
At the end of one Tuesday night, there was a small piece of rod left in the oven. I'd used all the colors I'd put in. All The Glass had done the same. The piece looked black, as all hot opaque colors tend to do. The slice was the same size as the pieces I cut for spirals and feathers. I was coming in the next afternoon anyway, and, being tired, figured the piece might be mine, so I set it aside to use it. It was the day before the midterm; I wouldn't see the color until days afterwards.
As the spiral had cooled in the annealer, I realized that this greenish color was not mine. Whose was it?
The second one I tried that afternoon did not go as well. My partner for the day was new to the threading machine, and the pipe jumped the pulleys as she was turning. We ended up with a blob up top and a curlicue at the bottom. The blob pulled the glass weirdly when I tried to spin it out.
On a whim, I made a tiny floppy bowl with my last slice of rod.
Over two days, I'd made a handful of colorful tinies:
For the first time in two years, we had a real midterm critique. All The Glass brought pizza, as he always does. I showed off my better feathering, a couple of spiral floppies, and a tiny vase.
One of the new advanced students said she'd wanted to bring in a color piece, but she lost her slice of rod, having left it in the oven. Aha!
I fessed up. "I think I took it. It's in the annealer now. I think it's greenish?"
After crit was over, I insisted she come to my locker and pick out some color from my collection of rods. I sent her away with three different slices.
And then, somehow, March was nearly over. Our Instructor had given us our final assignment: make a series of three pieces. Mine would be spiral floppy bowls with white on the outside and different colors inside. I only needed to make a few more to get the assignment out of the way.
I could feel the next phase coming on: the end-of-semester purge. It was time to start thinking about a spring glass sale.
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