Glass Blowing: Day 1

I have always had a great love and respect for the art of glass blowing since I was a child.  I loved going to arts and crafts fairs and see the way that people could bend glass to their will.  What solidified this love affair was when Memere took me to Murano Island just outside Venice to see some of the most famous glass being made(hopefully by tomorrow you can read the Wiki article as it is currently blacked out).

Back in December I attended an event at the Pittsburgh Glass Center and found that they also offered classes in glass work, so I figured why not.

Tonight our first class was lead by the teacher and the TA, one looking more hipster than the next.  Apparently PGH is becoming quite the hipster scene, but I digress.  The class was going over a lot of the fundamentals like the names and uses of the equipment, getting in and out of the bench, how to use the yolk and glory hole.  The cool part was that we got to practice gathering glass and playing around with some of the tools during the second half of the class.

While PGC has a different glass storage tank, the picture here gives you an idea of just how much heat and light the molten glass gives off.  I could only begin to imagine what it would be like working in a PGH steel mill. 

As the glass beings to cool, it is really important to get it hot again so the glass blower can continue to work on his/her piece.  The best advice was to "wait in front of the glory hole (below) until you are really hot and then wait for a little longer."

By the end I was able to gather a good bit of glass and felt that this would be the beginning of an amazing eight week class.

What I took away from the class was a deep appreciation of what glass blowers are able to accomplish with such a difficult medium.  They make everything seem seamless as they move around the studio.  All of us were awkwardly fumbling around making sure that our poles were constantly moving as we tried to get the right amount of glass and accomplish something before the glass was too cool and we had to head back to heat it up again.