21 November 2022
I: Spiders, Part One
I'm still feeling unsettled after last week's critique. At this point in the semester, the Window Sill of Judgment fills up, and the rejects spill into boxes on the floor. The room is chaos.
Sifting through the rejects, I pull out one of the not-quite-round giant ornaments left over from the commission for my neighbor. With my phone open to a photograph of one of last summer's spiders, a Neoscona crucifera named Peachy, I copy the form onto the glass with a Sharpie. Then I fill it in with hot glue.
I flip the ornament over, scroll to a photo from the I-95 pedestrian bridge, and copy the shape of a large Larinioides sclopetarius.
On the window sill right now are five of the cups with tails. They're bound for re-melting unless I can come up with something interesting to do with them.
Well.
A tail could use a cat, couldn't it?
It's important to make sure the top is completely sealed when sand-blasting the outside of a vessel.
Sand-blasting is messy business. Pressurized air sends fine grains of sand through a hose with a foot-operated trigger, all inside a large glove box with a window that clouds over in a matter of seconds. It is imperative to wear a respirator -- these N95s are good for many things -- even though the box is sealed. "Once in your lungs," Our Instructor taught us, "it's there forever."
The best I can do is to hold the piece up to the light inside the box and hope to find a shiny spot through the haze. Then I blast that spot until it's no longer shiny.
We have to wait five minutes for the dust to settle before we open the box, at which point, all the spots we've missed become obvious, and we have to go through it all again.
I got lucky this time. The glue held, and the shiny spiders are obvious against the sand-blasted green background.
I guess I missed gluing a few spots, or the sand got under the glue, because the cat looks as if it's been colored in by a child.
All the glue came off in one piece. I now have some very grungy, rubbery forms. It wouldn't be a good idea to try to use these a second time. I take them home anyway, for no good reason.
II: Art Thing
Halloween is next week. The Colonel has a plan for something spooky that isn't a pumpkin. He draws with colored chalk on the classroom floor. It's a heart, with two blood vessels at the top, protruding like horns. In the center is an eye, with a lid and lashes. At the bottom is a sphere resting on a triangular base. Adorning the sides are split curlicues. It's scary indeed, but perhaps not in the way he has intended.
Our job is to bring him bits of colored glass, help with the air supply, open the glory hole doors, and do whatever else he needs. I'm one of the volunteers. I end up bringing him a blob of white for the eye. I also help him cap the pipe when he flattens the heart; this keeps the air in and the piece from collapsing.
When I'm not helping, I'm sitting on the other bench, out of the way. Across the room, All the Glass (who gives me permission to use his photo), is Keeper of the Flame, ready to aim at whatever the Colonel needs him to keep hot while he works.
The curlicues are the last step.
"Should I add anything else?" the Colonel asks.
Rose, guarding the furnace and glory hole doors, calls out, "Eyelashes!"
Eyelashes it is.
Tall Vase gets ready for the breakoff and takes the Art Thing to the annealer.
One thing is for sure, I tell myself: I will never try to make an Art Thing.
III: Spiders, Part Two
One good spider ornament deserves a couple more. I have another green reject, and there's that purple and green one that failed as a hummingbird feeder because the top isn't completely sealed. More hot glue, more sand-blasting.
IV: Oh, Right, the First Assignment
I'm still playing with wrapping shaped vessels. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. They're all far too small to be a real carafe.
One of my favorite colors is called Gold Ruby Extra. It's a pinkish-red transparent. The small vase I wrap it around goes straight into my permanent collection.
Yellow and red won't play well together. What happens if I put yellow on the inside and red on the outside?
Gah. Reject.
Okay. Let's stack Gold Ruby and Gold Amethyst and see what happens.
In the right light, I can almost see two different colors.
V: Cat Rescue, Part One
The tail cups are bound for the bin anyway, so what harm can I do by attempting to draw more cats around the tails?
Mojo poses for a curled cat. I draw a cat loaf, a reaching cat, a belly-up cat, and, finally, one that's about to play with its own tail.
I take them in on a Saturday afternoon to be sand-blasted.
It's disappointing, to say the least. Sand got under the glue again, three of the tails broke off when I removed the glue (maybe the heat of the glue was too much), and, after all that, the shapes are almost invisible unless I set the cups against a dark background.
So much work for nothing!
Art Thing is out of the annealer and on display. Art Thing mocks me. Art Thing, only a few days old, already looks world-weary.
VI: Oh, Right, the Assignment
A propos to nothing, I like how my office glass collection looks when it's dark outside.
Tall Vase is away; Pumpkin Master has asked me to fill in for him on a Saturday morning. On Wednesday night, the Colonel showed me a couple of ways to get a slanted top. I start with a few test pieces, just simple bubbles on the pipe that I cut and pull. I decide that I'm not patient enough to get the cutting thing down this semester. I'll stick with pulling unless a better pair of shears shows up.
Pumpkin Master helps me wrap vases. They're not getting bigger. They're getting smaller. I'm focusing on little spouts today anyway.
The thread broke on this one because the vase was too cold when we put it on. We went back and used the rest of the thread to wrap it again.
Cerulean Blue and Gold Amethyst wrapped separately:
There's a shift change at 1:00. Glass Ninja is working with someone who jumped into the empty slot.
I'm not scheduled to be here, but Old Man worked this morning instead of his regular slot now. I might as well stay.
"You can work with Alchemy," Glass Ninja tells me, because I am clearly not worth Glass Ninja's time. He is far and away the best glassblower in our group, and he knows it.
Alchemy texts Glass Ninja that he's not coming in. I'm on my own.
Might as well work on that carafe shape.
Glass Ninja and his Understudy are making long, large vases. My pieces get smaller and smaller, which is a thing that happens when I'm not comfortable.
Eventually, I ask Glass Ninja for advice on how to get the bottom shape I'm after. I keep at it with my clear, tiny things, trying to block out what's going on at the other bench.
In the end, everything I make that afternoon gets discarded a week later.
I give up on vases and coat the core of a giant ornament in Glow Green powder. The first goes wonky on the pipe. I make another one and put it in the annealer. I have a plan.
On the left is me having fun in the morning. On the right is me being insecure in the afternoon.
VII: Spiders, Part Three
On Tuesday, I bring the glue gun into class. Before we get started, I draw three spiders on Saturday's ornament and take it over to the sand-blaster.
Unfortunately, I've made a fatal error: with the fluorescent powder on the inside of the ornament, the whole thing glows a faint green. The spiders are barely visible. I need to rethink this.
VIII: Groan. The Assignment
All the Glass has decided to mimic Art Thing by making two spouts on one of his heavy vases. Fortunately, we were both paying attention last week, so we know what to do. It takes us an hour.
I've borrowed a slice of orange rod from All the Glass. I pair it with yellow. All the orange comes off in a big blob, followed by a skinny thread of yellow. We decide I should feather from the top to pull the orange down. I work too hot and too thin; the piece gets long and wobbly. It's a reject for sure.
All the Glass goes again. This time we're making four spouts instead of two. He thinks it doesn't go as well. "It's all practice," we agree.
Me, I'm tired of trying to make a carafe. I'm getting farther away from it. Screw all that. Let's wrap the outside of a vessel with reducing purple instead. I'll put a little spout on it.
All the Glass is finished with spouts. He experiments with crackling glass under a layer of clear for a pumpkin. We can't tell if the crackle holds.
I'm done with wraps and feathers. I haven't played with color the way I used to. I'm going to do that. Mixing Enamel White and Coffee Brown, I make a little vase with a tiny spout.
Slipping into the afternoon section the next day, I continue playing with color and spouts. I'm mostly working on my own; nobody took the fourth spot.
I also make a couple of giant ornaments. One has black on the inside and glow powder on the outside. The other is reversed.
In class at 6:00, the Colonel does a demo, part two from last week when we learned how to pull canes. Now he's showing us how to pick them up.
Art Thing surveys the setup with a weary eye.
The demonstrations take a couple of hours.
At the very end, he gives us another assignment. This time, we are to do something sculptural, something we haven't done before. We have to explore, get creative.
I look at the handout. Each instruction makes me angrier. I can't come up with an idea on command. I'm not interested in making handles (been there, done that, it sucked) or a blown foot, or an overlay to cut into. I'm auditing, for fuck's sake. I'm supposed to be here to have fun, not stress dreams.
IX: Spiders, Part Four
It's Saturday afternoon, and I have my glue gun with me again. I take the two ornaments into an empty classroom and start drawing. If the Colonel wants sculptural cold work, this is as close as I'm going to get.
Alchemy wanders in, his partner Old Man having left early. We bitch about class while I work the glue gun.
The ornament with black on the outside is a mess. I'd broken it off the pipe too early; it slumped into a squash shape. I draw on it anyway. It's all practice.
Sand-blasting takes a while. The one with the glow powder on the outside goes well, but I can't blast away enough of the black on the second one to get the effect I want. I give up on it and drop it into the smashing bucket.
I think the outside glow powder one is going to work!
I take it into the bathroom and hold it under the bright light for a while. Then I turn the lights off and hold my phone in front of the ornament. It exposes for so long that the ornament glows far brighter than my eyes can see.
I am so keeping this one.
X: Cat Rescue, Part Two
Rose has cued me into a thing called glass paint. I am not a painter. My first attempt to fill in a cat is so bad I wash the stuff off and try again. She says I'm using the wrong kind of brush, but there's only so much time and money I'm willing to spend on this particular rabbit hole. $20 is pretty much the limit.
After the cat is filled in, I realize that it needs a matching lip wrap, like the coffee mug I'm drinking from. I paint the rim black.
I move onto the sleeping cat.
I'd missed a spot sand-blasting, so I'd covered the cup with tape, exposing the spot, and went back in. Bad idea. It came out more blasted than the rest, an obvious rectangle. I turn it into a window.
The reaching cat is next.
Everything is going to need another coat or two, and I have to scrape the paint off the tails.
Once I'm finished, the cups get baked at 176 degrees (weirdly specific) for two hours, and then they cool off in the oven, just like our glass does in the annealer.
Might as well tackle the glowing ornament with the invisible spiders.
XI: All Right, All Right, I'll Do the Assignment!
It's Tuesday, I've taken the day off from work, and I'm pulling a double shift in the classroom. Classmate's Partner and Low Key are at the other bench. My partner is supposed to be a beginner assigned to this slot, but he rarely shows up. When he does, he arrives late and leaves early. "Just start," Classmates Partner tells me. "We'll help you." They've given up on him.
I stuff an excess of glass into a #8 block, pushing the extra onto the pipe. I need to work bigger. I'm going to work in clear and try for the carafe again.
I'm feeling relaxed. I take my time. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the beginner walk through the room and disappear. I see him sitting in the courtyard. He comes in again a while later and sits in the back of the room. Then he's gone, and he doesn't come back.
Meanwhile, I've made myself the shape I've been after all semester.
I heave a sigh of relief and start up again. Classmate's Partner helps with the wrap. We get it wrong, but I like the effect anyway. Unfortunately, I've worked it too hot and glued the punty to the bottom. When Low Key helps me break it off, it ends up with a gaping hole. We put it away anyhow. Maybe All the Glass can help me rescue it with one of his flower molds for a foot.
I go again. This time we nail it. The shape isn't as good as the other one, but the threading, Gold Ruby, does what I wanted it to do. The carafe is a tad off-kilter, but it's tall, for a change.
In the evening, All the Glass is goes for another four-spout piece. When we finish after a grueling hour, he declares he's never doing that again.
I work on a two-thread feather piece. It's all going swimmingly until I get to the final shaping. I'm working too hot and too thin. I try to rescue it with swings. It gets very long.
"I'm way out over my skis here," I tell All The Glass as we go to transfer it to a punty.
"Yes, you are," he says.
Lumpy and awkward as it is, we put it away. At least I got some spout practice in. The colors are the same as the ones I'd mixed with Alchemy. They look so different against a white background.
All The Glass fires up the big oven and we put the broken carafe in. It's too tall to stand up, so we lie it down and give it time. Then we stuff it onto the flower foot, which I don't think we've heated enough, but it sticks, the carafe balanced awkwardly on top. This is going to take some grinding later.
All The Glass makes flowers for the four-spout vase. I'm so tired that I encourage him to make more just so I can stay seated for a few more minutes. He stops at four.
I try a different two-color thread stack. They don't move together. Most of the blue stays on the pipe end. I feather the thread, then lose control as I get it too hot. The top goes out of line when I open it. I save it by heating it some more and swinging it.
I really need to slow down.
XII: I Got Nothin'
The more I think about the latest assignment, the less I want to do it. At this point, I'm fully prepared to go into the next crit empty-handed. Let it count against me. It doesn't matter. I already know I'm not one of the people in this class whose work he takes to. And I'm already registered for next semester anyway.
Tonight's demo is going to be in honor of the Phillies being in the World Series. On the blackboard is a drawing of a pumpkin with an X through it. I don't know the backstory or the culprits here, but I fully agree with the sentiment.
Art Thing watches from above the Colonel's supply cabinet.
I find somewhere to sit, away from the crowd, over on the bench opposite where the Colonel is working. I keep an eye on the clock. I want to get to a meeting at 7:30; I'm an appointed member of my township's Open Space committee and I've missed every meeting this semester. Today I'm going to leave class early. I no longer care about perfect attendance.
If "quiet quitting" is a thing, then so is "quiet rebelling." It's been a week since he assigned us the sculpture project. All I've come up with is nothing at all, and I'm starting to be okay with that.
I watch the Colonel shape the hat, put a button on the top, and draw a P on one side.
And then it hits me: I can make a spider.
I cross the room to stand next to All the Glass, once again the Keeper of the Flame. I tell him my idea. We discuss how we should do it.
The Colonel makes the brim for the hat by collapsing a bubble and shaping it. Genius.
We're supposed to present sketches of our idea to him tonight. All I can do is tell him, as I'm halfway out the door, what I plan to do. He gives me a suggestion for the legs, one that's different from what All the Glass came up with.
As I fall asleep, I see myself making legs by pulling clear glass from a punty.
In the morning, before work, I draw my plans and send a picture of them to the Colonel.
He thinks it's doable. "It might be a little tricky," he writes, "but I think you can pull it off with a few good attempts!"
A few? Fuck that. I'm going to try this once. I have better things to do with my time. I just got a rod of Cherry Red in the mail, to replace the one I used up, along with a cheap pack of mixed rod scraps and a cheap pack of scrap frit. I have new colors and I'm going to play with them! (Never mind that my locker is packed with colored frits and rods. I'm a sucker for new ones.)
Thursday night is the opening of Our Instructor's show in the arts center one building over from the classroom. I don't have much time to photograph Tuesday's work before the beginner class starts to file in. I take a few snaps without good staging.
The clear carafe is a keeper.
The second wrapped carafe is a keeper too.
The one All the Glass and I tried to rescue is a goner. When we heated it on its side, the side flattened. The base we made detaches as soon as I try to grind the bottom.
The over-my-skis vase has a lot wrong with it. It's lumpy and off-center. The colors don't thrill me either.
Alchemy wanders in, having just been over at the art show. He and I have a deal: we've agreed to give each other pieces we don't like. He looks at the threaded mess. He likes it.
"Yours," I tell him. I don't even bother to get a good photo of it.
The second feather vase of the evening looks better, but the two-thread pattern hasn't worked. The first color came off in a blob on the pipe. Little of it made it to the piece.
Alchemy tucks the awful vase under his arm. The Colonel opens the annealer prematureley -- it's already cooled down enough not to ruin anything -- to look at the Phillies cap.
Carrying my work in a sturdy reusable shopping bag, I walk over to the show. Alchemy follows.
XIII: Retrospective
In an instant, I'm reminded of how much I like Our Instructor's work.
I want to buy this one but it's already sold.
The gallery bends around to the back. At the corner, an older woman is sitting. Alchemy stands next to her.
"Got a question for you," he says, summoning me over.
The woman had asked to see the piece Alchemy was carrying. She likes it. She wants it. Alchemy is asking my permission to give it to her.
"I gave it to you," I tell him. "You can do with it what you want."
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
He hands her the lumpy, awkward mess off glass.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, I'm insulted that he was willing to give it away so quickly. On the other, she clearly likes it more than he does. I could have told Alchemy I wanted him to keep it. I could have told the woman she could have the thing for a hundred dollars. In the moment, I'm conflicted but glad the thing is out of my hands either way.
I continue on to the back of the gallery.
Pieces by two of my first semester's classmates are here:
They have their own studio now.
In the back of the gallery, I hear Our Instructor's voice. I hang around the edges of the small group he's chatting with until I get a chance to break in and say hello.
I really want to tell him how I feel about the class right now. I want to tell him I feel like I'm drowning. I know better than to tell him anything.
Classmate's Partner comes in. I join him in the front gallery as we admire Or Instructor's Work. Our Instructor comes in. I let a little of my discomfort leak out: "There's something about mixed media that messes with my synesthesia," I tell him. "I want the glass to be itself. Your work is harmony." It all looks so simple, so clean and pure, but what he had to do to get there is more complicated than anyone who doesn't blow glass would ever know.
By the end of the evening, Our Instructor is in the chair the older woman had been in, with a few of us old-timers hanging around. The Colonel, his beginners in tow, make their way towards us. The two of them talk about torchwork. I wonder how the Colonel feels right now. We've all learned not to mention Our Instructor's name around him. The Colonel is trying to forge a new path. We're trying to respect that.
The opening is scheduled to end at 7:00. I'd expected to be home an hour ago. Alchemy and I walk out to the parking lot. We keep talking next to our cars. Our Instructor walks past us. We wave goodbye and he drives away.
At home, I show the carafews to Jack. He doubts either of them will hold a full bottle of wine, which is 750 ml. I go into the kitchen with them to find out.
"700 ml!" I call out. "750 to the top!"
"950 ml to the neck!"
The clear one could use a stopper. I reach into the display cabinet, to the shelf where the paperweights are, and pull out the one and only marble I'd made using Our Instructor's tools.
XIV: Out in the Real World
The painted spider ornament still glows pale, the color being on the inside. My phone makes it light up.
On a rare Monday night outing to Philadelphia for dinner with a friend, Jack brings the wine and I carry the carafes. We're going to test them.
Not only do they pour well, but I also manage to pour the leftovers back into their respective wine bottles without a funnel and without spilling a drop. Being a lab tech has its advantages.
All that's left for me to do is to get the two-color thread thing onto a proper carafe shape, like the clear one.
XV: Are We There Yet?
I jump into another vacant Tuesday afternoon slot. My partner is supposed to be that beginner who never shows up. He's not there when I arrive, nor when I'm finally ready to start.
I set out making spider legs out of clear glass. Forty minutes later, I have eight that I'll try to use later, spread out over the pipe warmer.
The beginner rolls in. I ask straight up, "Are you here to work?" He says he is. He does, for about half an hour. I try to help him work out the details of the thing he wants to make, a single pencil holder on a foot. After we fail twice with his idea, I offer one, drawing it in chalk on the floor. He gets it backwards and it fails too. Rather than take another stab at it, he tells me to take my turn.
I'm feeling no pressure right now. I take my time with a slice of new cherry red rod. It's not the cherry red from Gaffer that is my favorite color ever. Gaffer glass is next to impossible to find these days, the company having been bought out by Reichenbach and the colors mired in production. So I'm testing Reichenbach's version.
I still struggle with shaping glass from rods. The tops are always too thick. Seeing that this will happen again, I keep the bottom thick as well, to balance out the proportions. I don't have enough glass at the top to make a decanter. I open it into a vase instead. A year ago I had no clue how to get this shape. Now it's my neck's-too-short default.
Reichenbach's is muddier than Gaffer's, and more orange too. I like it, though. This one will be part of my permanent collection right away.
"I'm going to the wood shop," the beginner tells me, and he's gone for the day. Classmate's Partner and Low Key are there to help me with punties and breakoffs when I need them.
When I bought the red rod, I also bought a scrap rod pack and a scrap frit pack. Both were cheap; none came with labels. The thing about raw color is that there's a decent chance the final color will look nothing like the rod or frit. Some colors "strike," which means they become the color they're supposed to be when the pigment is exposed to heat. A lot of rods look black simply because the glass is so dense. My scrap rod pack conveniently contained some chips and crumbles; I was able at least to guess at the final colors.
I pick up what I think is going to be some hue of transparent orange. I don't do so well on the shape this time. Hot orange looks like less hot clear; it's tough to gauge the heat and easy to lose control. I mangle it into a slightly off-kilter decanter.
Every one I make like this reminds me of a bird.
The last chunk I have warming up is, I think, a dark, transparent green. At least that's what the little flakes suggest.
All the Glass saunters in around 4:20, 40 minutes before our evening session begins. He sits down at my bench to fill in for my absent partner.
In my hands, greens are gooey. This one stretches out of decanter shape. Hot, it looks brown. In the annealer, it seems to stay brown. I cross out "green" on the little label I made for the rod and write, "topaz?"
It's green.
When I get home and search Olympic for the color, it's a good match for Gaffer's Lime Green, and wonder of wonders, there's bar in stock. I nab it.
I explain the legs on the pipe warmer. "That spider's gonna be big," All the Glass says.
"Not that big. The legs'll go underneath." But I'm already thinking I'll take the suggestion he had last week: we'll use hot bits instead of that pile of legs.
We give it a go. I fashion the body while All the Glass brings me bits. It takes us a few tries to figure out the heat and thickness. The legs are gangly and not at all what I'd hoped for. They're on, though. Good enough. I stick a hook on the spinarret end. We put it away.
"There. I made a fucking spider."
When my turn comes up again, we make a two-color thread piece from light purples against white. I half-feather it in both directions to accent the color change. It's another one for my permanent collection.
The last one of the night doesn't go as well. I've stacked cherry red with one of the scrap rod pieces that looks orange. Halfway through, I lose control of the shape. It turns out looking like a distorted sippy cup, and what I thought was an orange rod is just another variation of red.
Later, I roll a gather in what looks like orange and white frit, from the scrap pack. It ends up being red and orange when the ornament is finished.
There's still the matter of the pile of legs on the pipe warmer. I have an idea. What if I gather them up into a random sculpture, eight leggy things sticking into the air. It doesn't work at all. The legs collapse in the glory hole. I turn the object into something resembling a paperweight. "I think you'll like it," All the Glass Says.
I don't. When it comes out of the annealer two days later, it goes straight to the trash.
XVI: Spider Surgery
The same day the leg melt goes into the smash bucket, I decide that the spider could use a little sand-blasting to accentuate the inner bubbles.
I have a roll of masking tape in my locker, because of course I do. I chat with one of the beginners I haven't met before while I wrap the top of the body. It's Thursday night; the beginner class is going to start in a few minutes.
In the sand blaster, two legs break off. She's a six-legged spider named Peachy.
I peel off the tape, rinse the spider, and line the broken legs up underneath. It's worth saving.
At home, I reattach the legs with glue that cures under blue light.
Instructed to say off her feet for a while, Peachy hangs above the Window Sill of Judgment.
XVII: Cat Rescue Part Three
Meanwhile, the craptacular cats are finsihed.
Some of the paint got in under the tails. It reflects weirdly. There's nothing I can do about it.
When I post them online, the black one gets a buyer within the hour. The rest remain for sale.
XVIII: Performance Anxiety
It's a rare Thursday night where the Colonel lets us work rather than watch a demo. Class nights have been well-attended this semester. It's chaos. There's the traditional mad rush to sign up on the whiteboard. All the Glass sits in as my partner.
All around the room, people are moving and talking. The Colonel is jumping in to give advice. I'm unfocused and try to cram too much glass into a #8 block, right in front of him. Rookie mistake. I get the glass back into shape and set to work. I'm aiming for a carafe, but I have too much glass on the pipe end. I shape it into a vase. The bottom is thick. The top is thick. It's heavy. Or, if I want to sell it, "sturdy."
This is my performance anxiety vase.
I have to admit, I'm getting better at tuning people out on class nights. I still don't like working in this chaos, though.
The Colonel agrees with me. He can't focus with this much going on around him either.
Pumpkin Master asks if I can be his partner in place of the absent Tall Vase on Saturday. I'm his second choice behind Classmate's Partner, who already said he couldn't make it. "Yes!" I tell him, and send my regrets to the Hill Slugs.
I'm relaxed when I show up on Saturday morning. While we're waiting for our color to warm up, we get to work on a spider. I'm trying something different this time. I want to attach a cephalothorax to the abdomen. I think it will look more realistic.
When Pumpkin Master brings me the bit for the cephalothorax, I place it a little too far under the abdomen. The legs go on all gangly. When we put it in the annealer, I can't tell if I've done it right or completely botched it.
I assist Pumpkin Master on a complicated piece that takes us the better part of an hour. Then I pick up a rod of cherry red and get a carafe out of it. In the annealer, it leans. I'm hoping that's just the mesh. If not, I'll grind it.
On my next turn, I try again with a slice of orange rod. I don't quite nail the shape this time. It's more of a milk bottle.
In my notebook, I write, "My work is much better when I'm relaxed and not rushing."
Thanks for that wisdom, Captain Obvious.
XIX: Why not Paraffin?
Plain Jim uses paraffin to lubricate his bike chain. I wonder if I can use it to carve images for sand-blasting.
Jim gives me a bar of wax. I buy a cheap crock pot, another $20 sunk into cold working.
Out of the reject box I pull a dark blue giant ornament. I roll the top in the wax and let it harden. Then I take a scalpel and draw two trees, a moon, and a little star.
I'll sand-blast this on Tuesday. I'm doing a double again.
XX: Same Goals, Different Day
I have a massive headache when I leave the lab. It hasn't gone away when I arrive at the college. In the car, I eat my lunch and down two naproxen. Now I have to wait 20 minutes for it to hit.
The beginner is already there and working when I arrive. By the time I get my shit together, the headache is gone and it's my turn. I start off with a couple of ornaments made from unlabeled bags of scrap frit. One looks to be turquoise, the other dark green.
The beginner announces that he's going over to the wood shop. Part of me wants to say, "Just stay there," but out of my mouth comes, "You're supposed to be my partner. But, whatever. The semester's almost over." He leaves.
I check on the second spider. What a mess those legs are! I like the body, though. I'll have to try that again.
I've found that when I like a color, the pieces I make with it turn out better. The carafe is on the small side, but the shape is exactly what I was aiming for.
The smaller orange one didn't turn out as well.
One of the scrap frits looked like dark purple in the bag. As an ornament, the color has a bit of red in it.
I might as well head over to the sand blaster. It won't take me long to do this ornament. While I'm in there, Low Key sticks her head in. "He's back," she says. "Your partner is back."
He makes something, then helps me with a lime green carafe, another crooked bird.
Then he leaves again. I'm fine with that. One less thing to focus on.
I make a vase from a piece of scrap rod that looks like it should be yellow. It turns out to be an orange-red.
With fifteen minutes left in class, I ask Classmate's Partner if he wants to help me with a spider. I try the same thing as Saturday, only this time I add some color to the abdomen. CP brings me a bit for the cephalothorax. I don't shape it as well as last time. The legs are still an uncontrolled mess as CP brings me one bit at a time.
At the sixth leg, I notice that the glass on the pipe is starting to crack. That means it's too cold. But I can't get the spider too hot or the legs will start to move and melt. We torch the pipe with the hand-held torches. It doesn't do much.
He brings me the seventh leg. We only have one more after this. We might make it. I take the spider to the glory hole, and as I'm about to put it in, the piece explodes off the pipe. I shrug.
All the Glass had arrived in the middle of all this, coming in and out as he set up for the night. He didn't witness the explosion. I don't want to try again. Instead, I load the oven with half-moons of color pairs I'd put together last week.
The first is cherry red with one of the scrap rods that looks yellow but I don't yet know is also a slightly different version of cherry red. I get a small, heavy carafe out of it.
The next pair is the not-yellow again, this time with orange. We can tell when the change to the second color happens as we thread, but we have no idea what they'll look like together.
I mess up the shape and wind up with a fat-headed bird. The colors worked together, though, probably because they're almost the same thing.
At the end of the night, I'm tired. A piece of the end of the thread has caught onto the side of the spiral, making a line against the swirls. When I notice this, I'm no longer invested. I go for a small cup that ends up being a bit off-center.
I still have a few minutes, so I bang out two more ornaments, both white underneath the orange scrap frit mix. I guess I have about six now. Soon I'll have enough to sell.
At home, I use a scalpel to scrape away the paraffin, then wash the ornament with dish soap. The kitchen lighting isn't good for glass photography, but I'm too beat to move somewhere else.
For the most part, the paraffin experiment worked. The trees are a little jagged. I'm surprised the star worked as well as it did. The moon's shape has more to do with my bad carving than with the wax.
I think I'll invest in some more wax. I can't reuse what's been sand-blasted because it's impregnated with sand. Next time I'll focus on smooth contours that I can get by dipping without carving.
XXI: Critique
I know that the Colonel really only wants to see our sculpture assignment, but I've been doing so much cold-working that I think he should see. Plus, I finally got the carafe shape. I wheel in a suitcase full of glass, far more than anyone else has.
I have the sand-blasted spider ornament that glows, the painted cat cups, some carafes, and, of course, the two spiders.
Before we launch into the critique, there's class business to discuss. There's going to be an artisan fair on campus, and our class has been given a booth. He needs volunteers. LT1 won't be back next semester; she's moving away. We're going to need to revamp the scheduling process. He wants more open class times so that we're not all rushing to the schedule the day it comes out. He needs people who are willing to start the ovens in the morning and recharge the furnace at night. He thinks we should have a second glory hole.
"Paint it hot pink!" Old Man says.
Tall Vase says, "At Corning, they don't call it a glory hole." He can't remember exactly what it is they call it.
"If we have two," I offer, "one could be the A-Hole."
Everyone bursts out laughing.
"Number one and number two," someone offers.
When it's my turn for show-and-tell, it's the spiders that steal center stage. The Colonel likes them! Unfortunately, he thinks I'll be making more. "The first is the worst," he tells the class. I don't know about that. I like the first one better than the second, and the third exploded.
The Colonel reminds us that our labs are supposed to be collaborative. If my piece needs three people (one for the legs, one for the body, and one for the big torch to keep the pipe warm), I should be able to ask for help.
As we go around the room, it seems that most of us had misunderstood the assignment. Not only were we supposed to do something sculptural, but we were also supposed to use a technique that could be practical or sculptural. The two youngest people in the class got it, using handles for a mug and to make arms, and pulling stems for flowers and necks on bottles. Oh. Oops. Oh well. If I'd understood the assignment, I'd have done nothing at all. Unless a spider leg is the same as a handle. Whatever.
After the critique is over, the Colonel gives us another assignment, something collaborative. I ask if my spider project counts. He says it does. Glass Ninja comes up to me with a suggestion for how to do the legs in a different way. It's rare that he pays any attention to what I'm doing.
One of Peachy's legs breaks again on the ride home. I give her another round of glue surgery and hang her in the window next to her gangly sister.
Critique is over. The Window Sill of Judgment is full. We have one more month of class. I unpack the suitcase, moving pieces into the permanent collection or one of the boxes labeled "sell" or "rejects." It's time for an early purge.
