I'm a sucker for transparent reds.
Week Five
3 March 2024, 2:13 p.m.
Sage called out sick again. I was expecting a calm Sunday, just me and CP working together.
When I walked in at 8:15 for the 8:30 class, CP had already started working and there was a stranger setting up at the other bench.
"Are you Murano?" I asked.
"I am."
And the calm Sunday went straight up the exhaust vent. Murano is intense, like Glass Ninja, and dominant too. My first piece fell off the punty on my final trip to the glory hole when I stopped suddenly as he crossed my path. I went again, CP helping me with a lip wrap on my second try at a long, tall drinking glass.
The wrap looks like it's sliding off the top. I'm getting worse at this, not better.
Murano was setting up a fancy stem for a goblet and wanted one of us to bring him a blown foot. Neither CP nor I have done this before. I was eager to learn, but I was still finishing my glass when he needed it. He showed CP what to do. It didn't go as planned. I volunteered to help. He asked for a small bit to go between the stem and the foot. For anyone else I've worked with, what I brought would have been fine. But he was very particular. He set one up for me the way he wanted it and handed it off to me to bring to him. He still wasn't satisfied and cut it off, deciding to go straight for the foot. On my first try, there was miscommunication and I blew the bubble too thin. On the second try, I got my part right, but he said he had his stem too hot, and the bubble went on off-center. The rest of us would have carried on, but he dumped the whole thing in the waste bucket. Now I know what Low Key was talking about last week. I guess when you're that good, you don't need pratice pieces cluttering up your house.
I had sawed off the top of the vase I'd blown into the collar of a square mold last week. I didn't like it. I'd put it back in the big oven, figuring I'd try again. I told Murano what I was up to. "You could do an encalmo," he suggested.
Our Instructor did encalmo demonstrations a few times. I had put it in the I'll-never-try-this category. Well, Murano knew what to do and guided me through it. I picked up a rod of color, blowing a bubble into it that kind of got away from me a little. The plan was to open up the bottom while I was still on the pipe, so we did that, and I cut away a fair portion of the open part so that we could get the right diameter opening. That took some fighting with the glass, but we got it where we needed it. I went into the big oven, doing my best to match the opening of the piece on my pipe with the opening of the cup in the oven. I almost got it. Murano showed me how to get the sides to melt together. Once I started getting that under control, he went to help CP with one of his random sculptural pieces. Eventually, I got a cylinder out of it, with Murano's help at the end. "It looks like a half-full glass, with the full part on the top," he said. "Reverse optimism," I suggested.
CP was disappointed with his sculptural piece. We'd been trying to stay out of each other's way, but he needed more time in the glory hole than he could get with the two of us wrangling our large pieces at the same time. "We can't have two ambitious pieces going at once," he said. I agreed. I invited him to join us on Monday so that we could work together and he could make another one.
I helped him make a couple of hollow hearts while Murano did a double encalmo the right way. I scurried between the two of them to help them both when they needed it. I made sure CP got what he needed when he needed it, even if it meant Murano had to wait.
With 15 minutes left to go, I picked up the last bit of color I had in the little oven to make a tall drinking glass, and with CP's help, added a blue aventurine lip wrap.
I asked Murano if he's planning to take the class in the fall. He said he wants to. I asked Pumpkin Master if he knows what's going on with the advanced class. The beginner class shows up for Thursday nights, our usual time, with the Colonel as the instructor. There's still no time nor instructor listed for the advanced class. He said, "I think they might do the workshop again."
I don't know how I feel about that. I like being able to jump into free sessions to work with different people. I also like being able to do whatever I want instead of being assigned to make something that doesn't thrill me. But I really don't want to be the one to try to corral ten students again. And I'm not keen on giving up any more Sundays. It's beautiful out today. I'm going to go on a short, solo bike ride now.
9 March 2024, 5:49 p.m.
I decided to go straight to the Dean for an answer about the fall. On Monday morning, I sent her an email, thanking her for the workshop and asking her what was going to happen next semester.
I was pleasantly surprised when she replied less than an hour later: "There is just one section of glassblowing in the fall. All levels of students are encouraged to enroll." I passed that on to everyone in the workshop and to the absent regulars.
All The Glass said he's coming back and asked if I wanted to be his partner again. Yes!
Registration for auditors like me has always been something like a week after everyone else gets their chance. I wrote to the registrar to find out when that would be. This time, everyone registers for the fall semester on the same day.
I had visions of high school, lining up at the rear door of the local department store before sunrise, running through the fine China section to be the first at the Ticketron counter. There are 20 open slots listed for glassblowing. Last fall there were 18 advanced students and 7 beginners.
Midnight, March 25. I set a reminder on my phone.
Also, the fall semester is beginning ridiculously early this time: August 21. The first day of class is the day we clean the classroom and choose our "lab" slots. I'm going to be in Canada. I think it's the day we climb two mountains. I hope it's that day. I don't want to be stressing out about whether or not I get an evening slot the day before I have to climb two mountains. I'm also hoping that I can call in or that All The Glass can be my proxy, and that someone from the workshop will have my back if the Colonel objects.
On Monday night, Low Key came in to make up for the Saturday two weeks ago when the glory hole belched fire. She worked with Rose while I attempted a few more tree of life ornaments, this time with two gathers and color. I put two large ones in the annealer and two in the discard bin. For the first one, I used some leftover transparent frit mix I had in a baggie from a flower I made years ago. I used that up and switched to a purple mix that didn't work well at all. It was too opaque. I put a small one in the annealer.
The scrap pink one came out as a witch's ball.
The large one with purple frit went from the annealer to the waste bucket. The little purple one was at least round, if nothing else.
CP arrived at 6:30. He made a pitcher. Then we got to work on a lip wrap glass from a topaz rod. It wasn't my best work. When I accidentally splashed water on the bottom as I was applying water to the punty to break it off at the end, the bottom cracked. CP carried it to the waste bucket. 20 minutes later, I asked Pumpkin Master if it would be OK to put it in the annealer. "It's still hot," he said. "It should be okay." So I did. I had an idea. On Sunday, I could stand it on the round end in the big furnace and blow into it.
CP made some hearts. I still had a rod left in the little oven. I picked it up with 20 minutes of class left to go. The color was one I hadn't used in a while. I thought it was Ultramarine, but it was actually Opal Dark Green, a color that I'd bought a while back for threading. I'd used it by itself only once before, and, as I had back then, I lost control of the bubble pretty early. Greens are like that. When we went to break the piece off the pipe, once again I missed with the water. The top, very thin, broke off unevenly. I decided it wasn't worth trimming. Instead, I decided to just spin it out and call it a night.
When I took it out of the annealer two days later, I spent forever grinding the bottom down so it would sit flat. I'd sand it for a while, set it down to check for wobble, find wobble, pick it up, grind it some more, and see that I'd started a whole new surface. I was reminded of the time Pumpkin Master was running into the same problem with a piece he was grinding. "This thing has more planes than the Philadelphia airport!" Eventually I settled on one, but by this point the bottom was a geometric mess.
Also, one of the sides had folded in on itself.
I brought it home. It lasted about ten minutes on the Window Sill of Judgment before I wrapped it up with some Blue Jade rod and packed it into my tool case. I'd use this as a wacky overlay on Sunday.
This semester I seem to be reusing a lot of my failures rather than discarding them or trying to explain them.
Anyway, back to Monday night. The temperature in Sunday's annealer had come down enough for us to take our work home. Usually this takes two days. My guess is that, with so little glass in there to hold the heat, when the oven steps down, the temperature drops more quickly. Pumpkin Master thinks the Colonel adjusted the program so he could take his work home sooner.
So I got to see the encalmo piece a day early. I didn't like it. Something about the seam bothered me. On Wednesday morning, I wrapped most of the bottom and top in tape. Using poster putty, I created wavy lines at the boundaries. When I went to pick up Monday's work on Wednesday evening, I used the sand-blaster.
I like it better this way. The wavy line doesn't hide the bad seam; it goes along with it.
Still kind of ugly, but it's my first and maybe only encalmo, so I have to keep it. The pattern reminds me of one of those three-flavor ice cream bricks we used to get at birthday parties.
All the lip wrap cups and glasses get their turn at the breakfast table. Right now, I'm using the red one with the blue wrap that I made on Sunday. It doesn't seem to fit in with the crowd on the shelf. It's thick at the top, but the hand feel is decent enough.
Last night I looked at this semester's shelf. I've taken all the lip wrap cups from last semester and put them with the ones I've made this semester. The older ones are thinner. I wonder how much the temperature of the furnace has to do with that. Excuses, excuses.
The top shelf is all the sculptural stuff the Colonel had us make, plus the Junks in the Trunks. The second shelf is all the vases I made, half of which happened after we found out class would ge canceled. The third shelf is all the lip wraps and the pieces I've made during the workshop.
They're so different! I never know what I'll get up to when the semester begins. I never know what the story is going to be.
I think last semester's story was "Hurry up and make all the things." This semester's is "I have time. Let's get back to basics." And also, "Reuse failures."
10 March 2024 2:28 p.m.
I tried to go to sleep an hour early last night so that I wouldn't lose anything to Daylight Savings Time. I had to wake up before sunrise, which threw me off. I figured I'd be stumbling through class today.
Sage is still injured. It was just CP and me in the hotshop. We took our time and neither of us sent anything to the floor.
I came into the semester unsure about lip wraps and how to get a round opening out of the square mold. I've been practicing both for five weeks now. It was high time I put the two together.
Today I made two of them.
While I was hoping for taller, thinner pieces, these will do for my first time out.
I'm getting better at bringing CP the right amount of glass for his pitcher handles. He's getting better at bringing me the right amount of glass for lip wraps.
Pumpkin Master wandered in. "Did you get the email about the lockers?" he asked.
"Nope."
Apparently, we are all to empty our lockers completely at the end of the semester. "Any locks left, they'll cut off," he said. In the fall, people will have to sign up for lockers, which will be available to all the craftspeople in the building, not just us glassy folks.
Well that sucks. I won't be here for the first two weeks. I guess that means I'll be dragging my pipes, color, and tools back and forth every week.
I took a chunk of Blue Jade rod and went into the big oven to pick up the mess of the green bowl from last week. I let the bowl fold into the rod's bubble in an uneven ruffle. I shaped it a little but left the texture, including little air bubbles from when the bowl's sides collapsed onto the rod. I let the unevenness dictate the top. Rather than fight with it, I let a finger of dark green that was pulling one side up do just that.
CP made one of his nifty random melty sculptural pieces.
I found Pumpkin Master in the hallway. "If you want to forward me the email, I'll send it to everyone."
"Nah," he said. "I want to find out for sure what's going on first. These lockers were brought here specifically for the glassblowers. They've been customized." Mine isn't, but others have built-in shelves to hold rod and frit.
"Maybe they can provide a place in the classroom for our pipes," I suggested. "I don't want to be hauling my pipes around."
"Me neither," he said. "I'm gonna talk to them."
I went back into the big oven to pull out the top of the cracked cup from last week. I used white frit, which ended up being much more malleable than I expeced it to be. I got a very long, thin bubble to go inside the cup. It was so thin that I was losing the round shape. I dunked it into the square mold, which, fortunately, I hadn't put away. We stuck a lip wrap on it.
I invited CP to come back tomorrow night so we can work together again and leave Rose to her pumpkins. She made seven last week. She says her record is fourteen in one session.
14 March 2024, 8:30 p.m.
The annealer we use on Sundays comes down fast. I was able to see Sunday's work on Monday evening. Now that we've leaped forward an hour, there's sunlight enough to snap some photos outside before class begins.
The lip-wrapped square mold cups look like mason jars. Full of water, they have a decent hand feel, even though they're heavy.
The broken cup rescue came out kinda fun.
The collapsed floppy bowl experiment, not so much. There's a lot of texture to it, which I like. I think I don't like the dark green color, which translates to me not really liking the piece as a whole.
CP got held up at work, so I had to pull Rose away from her pumpkins to help me put lip wraps on cups. I'd rolled the first gather over the bed of nails, which is my favorite classroom toy. It's been a while since I've used it.
The first one I made was tall. When I went to fire-polish the punty after breakoff, the bottom cracked. I put it in the annealer anyway. I tried again. This time I didn't even fire-polish the bottom and it still cracked. I put that one away too.
The second one cracked so badly that I discarded it when it came out of the annealer. I filled the taller one with scraps. I'll put it in the big oven on Sunday and hope it stays together long enough for me to blow a supporting bubble into it and melt it again.
The third time, my jack line was bad and it broke off the pipe unevenly. We put a wrap on it anyway because I didn't want to distort the bubbles by pulling on the top. Instead, I resorted to one of the tricks I use when things go wrong late in the game: I spun it out. The bottom of this one stayed intact.
I go through phases like that. For a while, I couldn't center a piece on a punty to save my life. Then there was the stretch of time when my stuff would fall to the floor at various times. Monday was bad punty day, apparently.
I got into a rhythm. For every piece I was working on, Rose could crank out two pumpkins before I'd need her help. When I was finished, she'd be most of the way through another one, so I'd give her a hand at the final step.
Last week, she gave me and CP a bunch of color rods. She says she likes frit and not rods. I hear that. It's taken me a lot of time to get used to rods, and I'm still a little wary of them. But last week I took a chunk of what looked like a transparent red. I'm a sucker for a transparent red.
I picked up that rod on Monday, gathered over it, rolled it over the bed of nails, gathered more glass, and found myself with a too-big blob on the end of my pipe. I can work big if I have to; I prefer not to. As things go, this wasn't all that big. I managed to stay in the 8 block (which, admittedly, is so burned out that it's closer to a 10).
I got a decent shape out of it. I thought the lip was too thick, though, so I started in on pulling and trimming. I'm nowhere near good at that, especially when the piece is so hot I have to keep pulling my hand away while I'm trimming. It didn't go well, so I resorted to another of my bad-ending defaults: flare the top.
When I put it away, I was sure I'd want to saw that top right off the minute it came out of the annealer. It turned out not to be as bad as all that. It has three good sides anyway.
And the bubbles survived all that pulling.
I'm trying to use some of the rods that I hadn't bothered with in a while. Back when I was feathering all the time, I bought some dark colors. One was that awful opal green. Another was "Ultramarine." I put a slice of that in the little oven and attempted to make a long-neck vase out of it.
Monday was one of those nights where nothing was going to plan yet it was all in the annealer anyway. The streak continued when I neglected to open the narrow lip in time, nearly melting the top closed. In my rescue attempt, I shortened and thickened the neck into an off-center lump. I stared at it for a minute, then pulled on one end, creating an exaggerated pitcher lip.
"What this thing needs," I said to myself, "is a handle."
Just then, Pumpkin Master wandered in. Perfect. "Can you bring me a bit for a handle?"
I should say, at this point, that the last time I tried to make handles was a year ago. It didn't go particularly well and I lost interest. This semester, I've been watching CP make handle after handle for his idiosyncratic pitchers. I keep saying I'll give it a go myself.
Well, Pumpkin Master brought me a perfect bit, and he gave me some hints as I dropped it onto the lower half of the pitcher. I let it get a little too cold, so the attachment wasn't great, and I wasn't sure I wanted to fight with it to shape it any better than it was. The pitcher was tiny and sort of cute.
Not until I went to put it away did I notice that the handle wasn't aligned with the opposite side of the pitcher lip. Seriously? I was standing right on top of it!
Derp.
With about 15 minutes to go, I figured I could bang out another long-neck vase. Rose offered me a frit mix called "Jewel." I rolled the gather over the bed of nails.
And then managed to get the bubble stuck halfway down the neck. This is a shape I've made dozens of times now. What was wrong with me?
I refused to toss the piece. Instead, I gave myself a lesson on heat management. Keep the bottom cool, keep the very top cool, heat the neck, blow hard, move the bubble down bit by bit, now keep the whole neck cool and heat the crap out of the bottom...
Rose watched me from her bench. She'd already made 11 pumpkins, cleaned up, and was ready to leave. I narrated what was going on. She didn't seem interested.
"Got it!" I said, with about three minutes of class time left to go. The shape was a little off, with a ring of glass where the bubble finally broke through to the bottom. The top was a little off-center too.
It was a perfect candidate for a spot on Saint Miscellaneous. Rose mentioned that this frit looks good on a white background. Maybe I can use it again that way, with a sparser coat of color over a layer of white frit. Or white rod. I need the practice.
This afternoon, All The Glass got a response from his Right to Know request. We now have propane costs for the past three academic years, before and after the Colonel arrived. Long story short, it doesn't add up, but geez, running a glassblowing classroom is expensive!
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