Out of the Frying Pan and into the Furnace of Molten Glass

Guess where I was this week???
At glass blowing camp! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!
I was actually also at glass blowing camp last week, but I was too lazy to take pictures of my first  products, and thus no blog post ensued. However, I now DO have pictures of all my works! Thus, a blog post is currently ensuing. Yaaaay!
Where on earth did you go to find a glass blowing camp? Right here at the Carlos Museum! The first week all our activities really were in a little work room thing in the Carlos Museum, but the second week we were bussed off to Jenke Studios, which was part of a StudioPlex thing on Auburn.
First of all - what IS glass blowing camp? Like, were you actually BLOWING glass these past two weeks? Yes, I was! Well, not the first week. But last week surpassed my expectations by far and was really cool - and surprisingly do-able! I'll come back to that later...
Wait, if you weren't blowing glass on the first week of glass blowing camp, what WERE you doing? Well, from the description article-y thing, I had expected the first week to be a tedious prelude to the real deal in which we examined examples of glass found at the Carlos Museum.
But no!
I was pleasantly surprised when the first day we got right to our first technique - fusing! We learned to cut, glue, smash, and arrange glass. Our designs were then fused in a kiln overnight. Cutting any length of glass was horribly frustrating the first day, but went very smoothly the next, and my designs improved.
You can see in the pictures below that some of my designs were designed specifically for jewelry. One pair of earrings (not pictured) I gave to mom.

Two pendants. Jewelry making was the main activity on the last day.

My eeeye. This eye was inspired by Emma, who came up with the initial idea of making an eye. Her first attempt was more abstract and after no more eyes came up, I decided to try one myself.

My two "sets" These were pendants were designed in sync with their accompanying earrings.  I almost lost one of the green earrings...

This is probably my favorite piece of flat glass. This is a Sierpinski Triangle. It turned out a little more blobby after being fused, but it's still pretty cool.

I can't see how you could have just cut the designs on some pieces. Were there other techniques you used? Why yes. One technique that I used a lot was to make "Fritted glass", or frit. To make frit, one would take the color glass they wanted from little tins of shards, wrap it heavily in brown paper, go outside, and smash it heavily with a bowling pin. One would then trace a design on their glass with glue and sprinkle-shake the frit onto it.

I see some of your pieces have multiple bubbles. How did you do that? Was it intentional? The bubbles you see on my pieces actually are intentional, but many times people end up with unwanted bubbles. What happens, is people use glue to sort of steady the pattern of glass to be taken to the kiln. Most glass is then covered in a fitted sheet of clear, to give it a shiny coating. Sometimes in the kiln, as the clear glass collapses into the lower layers, it smothers the glue into little pockets. The glue melts into the glass and you are left with empty bubbles in the glass.

On one of my black and white designs, with the square spiral (see above) I actually deliberately distributed even dollops of glue along the black spiral, to become small bubbles in the finished piece. When I applied the clear layer, the glue squished out more than I had anticipated and I ended up wiping it all off and replacing the glue with white flecks of glass which you can see in the picture. Surprisingly, the glue bubbles actually showed up where I had planted them, even though I had wiped away most of the glue.

Surely you didn't just cut glass like this all week! What else did you do? Well, on the afternoon of the second day of the first week, we started bead making with blow torches! Using little canisters of flammable gas, we made a multitude of designs. There were two types of canisters. (Four canisters, twelve kids, three kids per group). One was just a simple yellow propane torch. You light the match, turn the knob, let the gas ignite, and proceed! The other type was hooked up to this complicated gas tank thing. Two knobs, green and red. Red is propane. Green is oxygen. To start it you light a match, turn the red knob towards you, extinguish the match, and turn the green knob away. To turn it off, twist the green knob in your direction and the red knob opposite.

What you do, is you take a stick called a mandrill, with the end coated in bead release (To get the bead off the stick). You turn on the torch and spin the mandril and your selected rod of glass around each other in a sort of warped disco movement. Constantly rotate the glass and mandrill with your fingers. The glass must be introduced to the heat gradually, or it will crack or explode. Glass does not like dramatic temperature changes. That is very important for every glass technique. Once your glass started glowing orange at the tip, you hold it in place, still rotating it, and spin the mandril in the shadow of its heat. The mandrill must be hot for the glass to stick. Eventually the glass will start blobbing at the end of your rod. Once the blob is big enough, wrap the molten glass around the tip of the mandrill. Break the connection in the heat of the flame.

Now rotate and shape the bead to your satisfaction. You could smush the bead into a cool shape, or give it a neat design with tweezers.

This is my duck :) Its eyes used to be the same size... sigh. I wanted to make another duck for a set of earrings, but my other ducks turned out horribly mutated.

There are other cool things you can do too. With a transparent color glass, you could coat an opaque bead. With these really thin glass "stringers" you could add spots, spikes, stripes, or other designs.

This bead was purple encased in clear with lighter purple spots

Once you finnish the bead, it is immersed in potting soil to "anneal" - a process of restricting the gradual cooling of heated glass, so that the glass is stabilized and less inclined to shatter.

I was proud with some of my beads. I made rabbit-slipper-hippo-blob earrings. I made a clear bead with red stripes, then another layer of clear, then more red, then more clear, and so on. One bead was a dark transparent purple with white stripes. Sometimes colors would blend together and become cool and mystical.

Lots of cool stuff you could do. Some of my beads that I liked I would duplicate and make earrings with on the last day.

With these beads I started out with a white encased in clear. I then added a gauzy, barely visible pink and brown coat of light streaks, covered by more clear. Then I added clear-topaz spots and a rim of reddish brown.

My hippo beads are in the top left corner. Not the best picture for viewing them, but I couldn't get a better one.

The first day was a disaster for me, but after that bead making went smoothly, and it was very fun.

This sounds so risky, and we haven't even gotten to the real glass blowing yet! What safety measures were taken to prevent injury? We had to wear safety goggles all day, if anyone at all was working or cutting glass. If a person was bead making, they would use tinted lenses. Hair was tied back. That's basically it. We didn't use gloves, ever, even glass blowing. Gloves limited our connection and agility when dealing with the glass. Good thing we signed a waver promising not to sue the camp if we die!

With that little safety precaution, someone must have gotten hurt! Did that happen in the first week! Yup. I myself got cut many times, and slightly burned my thumb once, picking up hot glass. There was one guy who bashed himself up a bunch, and two people badly burnt their hands. No one was scarred though. All in all it went pretty well. Emma glided through that week completely untouched.

That's all for the first week! I have lots more to tell you guys, but as I don't want to hold out on y'all, I'm going to go ahead and post what I have so far, and get right back to work finishing this post! If you're reading this and see that I've already written the complete post below, then congratulate me on my renewed work ethic!

Soooooo.... second week! Actually glass blowing? Whaaaaaat? That's right. I was BLOWING GLASS.  The layout of the workshop was simple. One furnace. Two glory holes (to reheat the glass pieces) An annealing oven and an annealing kiln thing. Two work benches. A metal table for applying color. A stand for blowing glass. Two large fans and one small one. A diamond grinder, for smoothing and polishing the bottoms of glass pieces. Some other polishing machine we didn't get to use. A sink. A worktable, where two torches were set up for additional bead making. Simple.
Outside the workshop was a very large field. Nearby, inside the appartment-office building thing was a water fountain, a bathroom, and a vending machine.
I'm going to go ahead and lay out the tools. Two sizes of "blocs"- wooden cup things with long handles. These are used to shape the glass more spherically. One long paddle, with a shortish handle and a broad flat part, to flatted and smooth facets of the glass. The wooden tools are kept in a bucket of water, so that they do not catch on fire when touching the glass. Some thick, wet newspaper is kept to mold the glass slightly with your hands. Long tongs-like things called jacks are used to score the glass above the pole where it will break off. They also open holes when making cups or jugs. Long tweezers are used for manipulating the glass.
To detach the glass, you stab the jackline with a wet butterknife and then WHACK the pole with a big stick. The piece pops off and is placed in the annealing oven with gloves.
Lots to remember.
I'm just gonna show you the pictures of the things I made for now. I will post back when I finish the description of each piece!

THE FLOWER

The flower was the first thing I made. Actually, to be honest, the first thing I made was a random clear blob I made with tweezers just to experiment with the glass. But this was the first real PIECE. This flower is very sad. It was a beautiful young flower, all spread out and floral, but then when my instructor helped me stretch out the stem, he squished the petals and it wilted. It WAS amazing though!

What you do is easy. Gather some glass on the end of your rod. Then you take it to the metal table (where you've lain out your color) and let it smoosh down to the end of the rod, smushing it on the color in a sort of collapsed pyramid shape. Then take it to a workbench and pull out the petals with tweezers. It was EASY. Sigh. And you know, in the shop, they sell these things for like $20.

THE PAPERWEIGHT

The paperweight was also surprisingly easy. You gather some glass and roll it on your color, making the blob at the end of the rod long. Then you take it to the bench and twist the color speckled glob with tweezers, making the color streak and swirl. You shape this with a bloc to make it round-ish, then add another layer of glass and heat it up. The swirls melt into the bigger ball. Shape this with the bloc as well. Then you are done! Seriously, that's all it takes.

THE CUP

This was my first blown glass piece. It was much more complicated, but very fun and satisfying. 

First you gather a glob of glass (duh).  Then you blow your bubble!

Blowing bubbles are HARD. Or at least, it was the first time. Like trying to inflate a stick. Once you get a small bubble it goes MUCH faster. Anyways, small bubble. Now you get another layer of glass on that bubble-blob, and blow the bubble bigger (try saying that five times fast). Use the bloc to make it round-ish every time you blow. Reheat. Now alternate between blowing and jacking (with breaks for the glory oven). Eventually you get an even sphere. 

Before the next step, you flash the bubble. Flashing is when you stick your glass all the way to the back of the glory whole for about 5 seconds. This gets it really hot for a long time. Before you go back to the bench, you dangle the pole towards the ground and swing it back and forth, like a pendulum. This makes it elongate to about the size and shape of a large water balloon, or a bloated cucumber. Now you use the paddle to make it all straight and cylindrical. 

Your instructor makes a little triangle of hot glass on the end of another rod (while you flash the cylinder again) and, back at the bench, you use the tweezers to place the triangle right at the center of the bottom of your cup-to-be.

Now you detach the cup from your original stick. Pinch a drop or two of water with the tweezers and press it into the jackline. Then whack the end of the pole with the back of the tweezers and the cup pops off, attached at the bottom to the new rod. The old rod is placed in a little metal bucket of ice behind you (which emits alarming exploding sounds for the next 10 minutes) and the new stick is placed in front of you on the bench.

Now, as you spin the pole with your left hand, you use the tweezers to gradually open the little hole left from the original jackline. Eventually you are using the tweezers to smooth out the sides and now you just add a new jackline, let it cool, and take it to the oven!

THE BOWL

The bowl starts out the same as the cup, with one main difference - color! We weren't supposed to use color on our first pice (the cup), so that we could see the tip of the rod and the bubble and whatnot, but now that we are all experienced and such, we can use a bit of color on our bowl. So, same as the cup, we blow a big bubble in several phases and utilize the jacks and the bloc to get another perfect bubble.

Now you use the paddle, but you don't smooth the sides this time - only the bottom, until you get a base the size you want it. Once the base is intact and flat, we can go ahead and transfer rods, so that we can open up the top of the bowl. Same transferring procedure as with the cup.

Now, we start out opening the hole, with the jacks this time. Soon we have a cup-like form, but we keep going, slanting back the jacks until we get the right level of slant we want.

Pretty simple, once you get the hand of blowing a bubble.

THE BOTTLE

We start by making a bubble, which is simple enough, but soon we arrive at something new - a double jackline! I start by making one farther out than usual, about centimeter away from the start of the bubble. Then another one at the normal place. The glass is reheated. The jacklines are reinforced. Now I line my jacks with the second jackline (further out) and streeeeetch out the neck, still spinning the rod.

Every time you stretch, you blow, and then squeeze the neck back down to size. This goes on for a while, and then we do the transfer.

The only thing we do once the neck is available, is widen it however much we want. I didn't widen mine that much, because it was already a nice balanced size, but you can see how it gets a bit wider towards the top.

THE MUG-HANDLE-PITCHER THING

Sigh. Why am I sighing? A wasted opportunity. Most of the people made big awesome pitchers, but I, one of the first people to go, only made a mug. Sigh. 

So, what is new about this mug (or the potential of a pitcher)? Well, a handle, of course! Plus color on a cup-thing, which is new, but not that exciting. Once you have your cup (or pitcher shape), the instructor gets a dollop of glass and roll-stretches it out on the metal table. They drip the bottom of the glass roll and stretch it up. You use diamond shears to clip it at the appropriate length. Then you let the cup roll with the handle facing down and you use tweezers to bring and connect it to the top of the cup.

Mine was a little disappointing to me, because my handle is a bit disproportionately thick (not really my fault though.)

 That's all my blown glasssssssss....

"But wait!" You might be thinking. "You just ended the class with a MUG? What sort of a finale is that?"

Not the true one, my friend. For I have not yet had the opportunity to photograph....

THE FISH.

That's right. On the last day, we made freaking FISH out of glass. They were epic. Since it was the last day, I won't be able to pick up my fish until later, but I will post when I do! When we made fish, we actually did work in pairs! Emma and I were partners. The role of the partner was basically to flash the fish every have second while the instructor got glass for fins and stuff. It was tiring -- and really stressful for me, because I was worried that I would either smash Emma's fish into the wall of the too-small Glory Hole, or else knock it off the pole accidentally.

It was equally stressful when Emma was handling my fish, but we were both fully competent fish handlers. :)

Now, enough about the technicalities. I will now talk about my experience at the hot shop!

It. Was. Hot.

I mean, duh. But it was HORRIBLE the first day. Cuz it was like 99 degrees outside anyways, so even when I wasn't in front of the furnace I was about to pass out - even if it tricked me into feeling like a relief. Plus I was really underslept. So the first day I basically had a complete melt down. It was kind of boring too.

The next days were better, mainly cuz it was colder. Like, the third day there was a thunder storm. That felt good. Really good. Even if the thunder was really close and loud and scary and we were basically enclosed in a big metal box. It never got quite as hot or miserable as the first day.

But the furnace - oooh, the furnace. It felt like death. Like the fire was already on you and scratching at your arms. Like your skin was actively blistering and peeling. Like you were about to explode. It wasn't just hot. It was full of pain and texture. It was SCARY.

I got used to it later in the week, but the death-iness never completely went away.

Luckily the second day they brought in the third fan, which helped a lot.

Our schedule was simple. Be at the Carlos Museum by 9. A bit after that, we are bused to the Studioplex. There's probably an example. Then two people go at a time, staggered, so that they don't have to wait for each other to get more glass, while the others either grind and polish their pieces, make beads, or hang out outside. There was a tent set up outside the main entrance, where people were drawing and reading and stuff. Emma and I mainly chose to hang out on the grass, where it was less crowded. Lunch would start anywhere from 11:30 to noon, and lasted for the next one and a half hours.  

People could visit the vending machine during lunch. Emma and I did. Yum. Juice. Then we would make a different piece in the afternoon (we only got through one piece per day on Thursday and Friday). Then we would leave at a quarter till to get back at the museum by 3. Or at least we were supposed to. The last day we got back more than half an hour late (although to be fair, the furnace had malfunctioned on the last day and there was a bit of a hold up). 

It wasn't really boring when we weren't blowing glass (although I couldn't wait to get back and do it more). There were things to do. Emma and I never actually made any beads the last week. It was just so hot and dramatic that we weren't really in the mood. But there were other activities. Grinding and polishing, for example. There were four saw-things to be placed on the grinder to achieve different levels of polishing - the first one was for smoothing down bumpy areas, and the others were basically just to repair the shine of those spots. 

Also, on Thursday, one of the instructor people brought out these big buckets of glass that we would put in a sieve thing over a large tank of water and small shards of glass to sort into colored glass and clear. Colored glass meaning glass with any flecks of color at all. Not just solid pieces. The water was from the hose we would spray to drain out the smaller glass. Emma and I were the main ones who did this, with this one other girl named Vanessa (who was amazing at glass blowing). We made this whole story thing.

The glass that fell through became soulless marsh glass, and was abandoned. At one point I was abandoned to the marsh glass as the ship (aka the sieve thing) sank into the bog, after having rescued most of the glass. It was really fun actually. Kind of addictive. Plus I liked using the hose.

There were three instructors. One we had had for our bead making instruction the previous week - a woman named Kate. Then there was Matt, who actually owned the studios. And then there was Christian, this guy in his early twenties, with this satyr-like beard thing, who I worked with the most. 

So yeah.

Hope that didn't bore you to death... just wait until you see the FISH! :)

~Julia