Life's Journey

Last night I brought my other dad Dean with me to a Glassblowing Class. Holy cow, this was a cool experience. I've always loved art and worked in various mediums. I admire glass art but never thought about trying to make it myself. Then Roy and I went to Italy with some friends and we took a boat over to Murano. This was so beautiful, I recommend this side trip to anyone that visits Venice. We took a tour of the Murano Glass Studio. They took us to the work room where they are creating new pieces. There was an older man creating something beautiful while we were there so we got to see the process. He was very nice and explained a lot of what he was doing. At that moment I was hooked and knew it was something I wanted to try…. Someday.

Well, yesterday turned out to be "someday". As I mentioned in a previous post this was a gift from an angel and I am so grateful. I hope this is something you try someday as well. When I looked up directions for the Circle 6 Studios where we had the class I found that it was in a very strange area of town. It was a neighborhood of old houses, and not one of the greatest in the city. So I checked out the satellite view on Google maps and realized they built a big shed studio in the back. Still a little sketchy but I was going with Dean so I wasn't too worried. When we found the place it is was actually really cool, it was as appeared on Google maps, a big shed built as a studio in a crummy area of old houses. But, it was really well done inside the studio and John and Justin that taught the class were super nice. 

This class is a "Seasonal Intro Class" which means you make different things at different times of the year. This month we made glass hearts with Valentines just around the corner. In December they made Christmas Ornaments, in October they made Glass Pumpkins, in spring they make flowers and summer is sun catchers. I was excited that we got to make hearts. The slightly disappointing thing is that this project didn't require the actual blowing of the glass, it was more a coloring and molding project. In the end I felt like this was actually cooler than blowing into it.

Here's a quickie rundown of how these things are created:

1. You use a puttee stick to get the liquid glass from the 2100 degree kiln - it comes out as a wad of heavy liquid on the end of the stick.
2. You have to remember to constantly turn the stick or the glass will just clump and fall right off and boom you're done.
3. Next step is to add the color - the color options were laid out in various trays, there was red, purple, blue teal, yellow, orange, white and what he called "confetti" which was basically a mix of left overs of various colors.. These were basically crushed up glass pieces in these various colors. He said you can pick one color and blend with white if you'd like. So I said I wanted to use red and the confetti. So to add the color we take the hot glass wad we just gathered from the kiln and press it into the glass color until it's pretty well covered. Then stick it in the 1800 degree oven. This melts the crunched colored pieces into the clear glass wad. Once melty it gets taken out and mashed into the other color and back in the over for a couple min.
4. Then we swirl the color. You sit on a bench and prop the stick on ledges across your lap. You use big elephant size tweezers and pick, twist, and pull on the glass wad. (btw, yup, I'm pretty sure that the technical name of this was "glass wad" - lol)
5. The glass wad needs to be bigger to fill the heart mold so then we go back to the kiln and add a layer of clear glass on top. This also makes it so the color glass is wrapped in a clear glass frame of sorts.
6. Now it has to be shaped so the glass wad is moved into the heart mold and cut off the stick. Then pressed to flatten.
7. Finally the now swirly colored heart shaped glass is taken to a cooling oven - this takes 12-16 hours then it's solid and ready to take home.

When the heart was formed the glass was so hot it looked orange so you couldn't really tell how the colors were going to come out. Today I had a small chemo treatment, after treatment mom and I went to lunch at a really fun old fashioned ice cream counter diner then went and picked up our creations at their gallery. The gallery had some really cool stuff including our hearts! They look really really good. I'm quite proud of my glass heart

This was a great experience, a lot of fun, and I’m so glad I could share it with Dean. If you have even a slight interest it's totally worth it if you get a chance to try it. Thank you again to the angel that made this happen - big virtual hugs comin atcha! I've included a the photo above but there are more in the photo gallery page.

Sending hugs and smiles,
Sarah