Pouring My Art Out

I have finished the classes for now. Here are two of my latest pieces of art… or pieces of Art, as it were.

I did not take a picture of the vase I made for my older daughter… the one who got me my first glass blowing lesson for Father’s Day… because she reads the blog now and then, and she is getting it for Christmas. But here is my fire bowl, and a new vase I made that matches the decor of our remodeled house. Hopefully, my wife will let me keep it… in the house… instead of the garage, where most of my art ends up. I am giving it to her for Christmas… but she doesn’t read the blog. HA!

I am very excited about the fire bowl. I was getting too caught up in the vases.

I think the colors really worked. You can see the colors I used in that last post, the one about how glass blowing is done. I like the shape too. My very first bowl. I had to hang the gathering rod straight down, and twirl it really fast, to let the weight of the hot glass widen the bowl shape out.

And the simple, gray and white scheme on the little vase should work in our house.

And I tried something new on the top edge of the vase too.

Instead of pulling the edge out into leaf shapes like I have been doing, I pulled out less neck, and then used the tongs to do a rounded-off, square lip. Sort of simple, yet a little elegant, if I do say so myself.

All in all, I loved learning yet another form of artistic expression. And, as always happens with my all-art-side-of-the-brain brain, I could have gone off in a million directions.

But I am seriously considering taking a ceramics class next.

How do you add colors to glass? Well, it turns out that you roll the hot glass in various chemicals and compounds, and then melt them into it.  The colors stretch and move as the glass is worked. Here we see the colors I laid out for my ‘flame bowl’ project. I will show you a picture of the finished flame bowl later on today.

But this is what it looked like before we finished shaping it. This is also a good picture of some of the many tools associated with glass work. We are rounding the glass in the big wooden ladle. Below is a big, flat piece of wood I called ‘the pizza spatula’, used for flattening the bottoms of things that need to be flattened on the bottom. There are the tongs, or tweezers, that come in all sizes, used for much of the shaping. There are also a pair of snips that can do lots of interesting things. These are just a few of the many tools that can be used.

Here is my teacher, Megg, gathering some more glass glass onto my biggest project. She is dripping off the extra glass into a water bucket.

I wish I could afford a bunch more lessons, so I could experiment with dribbling glass onto other glass. I had so many ideas, and so little time.

I forget why she was doing this instead of me. Maybe I let her do it so I could take the pictures.

There is a good shot of the cooling fountain, where water is used to cool down the gathering rod.

Okay, I shared those just for fun. I took three quick pictures with my phone, right in a row. The phone tried to adjust for the bright glow, and all three pictures came out just a little different.

I don’t know if I actually explained glass working and glass blowing in a way that gave you an idea of how it works. I was lucky enough, a few years ago, to go to Venice and see the glass workers in shops that were hundreds of years old. Maybe you can Google some videos if you want to know more.

Later on, I will post the photos of my newest glass pieces.

I know, I already sort of explained the glass blowing process, way back after my first lesson. But it is hard to take photos while working with molten glass. For my third and final class, I showed up a little early, and took some photos of my teacher, Megg, working with another student.

The small oven in the foreground is for flashing your work… no… not like that… get your mind out of the gutter. You stick the long gathering rod with the glass on the end in, to keep it hot so you can work the glass. You have to keep spinning the gathering rod, or, as the glass does warm up, it will start to run… like very hot honey.

Glass blowing is like a dance… a dance where you are holding a five-foot-long rod, or an equally-long hollow tube… with a blob of lava on the end. You need to be pretty careful of where that blob goes. And even when it starts to cool you could shatter it.

Here she is helping the other student… whom I have cropped out of the picture… by rolling the gathering tube on the two metal rails, while he uses some long tongs to open the mouth of his project.

I do like the way he put a lip of a new color on the piece.

As the glass opens up into a bowl, Megg uses the tongs… of which their are several sizes… to narrow the glass where it connects to the gathering rod. See, there is a bench on the back end of those two rolling rails. There are a lot of tools involved in glass blowing, and I didn’t even get around to using a lot of them.

Another view of the annealing… or slow-cooling oven… where the finished projects go to slowly come down in temperature over a long period of time. That is so they don’t shatter as they cool. In the foreground is a little water trough in a metal garbage can. The water spurts up in the middle of a groove. You use this to cool the gathering rods, or they become so hot that it is dangerous.

In the middle is the big oven, containing a huge bowl in which rest hundreds of gallons… or pounds… or whatever… of the molten glass, kept constantly red hot, and ready to be gathered. A surprisingly small blob is needed to make a fairly big piece of art, especially if you blow it up.

And then, it was my turn. Two hours of glass blowing fun. And I did a lot more of my own work than that other student. Just saying. I risked snapping a few selfies while I sat on the bench behind the rolling rails, and we… Megg and I… both turned the gathering rod while we used a big wooden ladle to round the outside of one of my projects.

And speaking of my projects, I picked them up this morning, and I will have some photos of them… as soon as we are done with one more post about glass working.

There I am, with my teacher, Megg… who is totally cool. Taking a selfie while working with molten glass is not for the faint of heart. Here you see us, with a huge blob of hot glass on the end of the long, hollow, blowing tube. We are using a rounded ladle-type thing, constantly dipped in water to keep it from catching fire, to round the outside of my latest project, while rolling the tube on these two metal tracks. You have to keep the glass moving and twirling, or it runs like really hot honey. I can’t pick the newest ones up until tomorrow… (literally)… They are slowly cooling in the annealing oven.

I got to class early, so I could wander around and take some photos.

Obviously, some people have taken more than three classes.

Just sayin’.

The glass blowing studio is in this weird, artsy compound. There is a cute little garden in back.

They do other artistic things in this little colony of artistic expression.

There is also a ceramics studio… which, I guess I will have to try next, now that I have done the glass blowing… and blacksmithing…

Because that is what I need… another kind of art project.

There is also a woodworking area, but I already carve tikis… so… uh… yeah.

Okay, join me tomorrow for some more pictures of the glass blowing process, as well as some pictures of my newest work!