Glass Blowing, Day 2

Day 2: Time to learn how to make a cup. Yup -- as in something to drink out of. To make cups, we actually had to learn how to use the blow pipes to blow air into the molten glass. Unfortunatley, the glass cools down as you're doing this (and rotating the pipe), so you have to keep reheating the glass, shaping it and then blowing into the end of the pipe until your bubble is big enough. Again, lots of things to think about all at once! Chances are that you'll also need MORE glass on there (you don't want it too thin) so you'll have to go and get more glass as well.

Keeping the glass hot enough to work with was one of the hardest things -- but if it wasn't hot enough, you couldn't shape it, and if you tried to blow into it when it was too cold, you'd end up close to passing out (or at least I did). But once you had your bubble, you had to elongate it into a cylinder, which involved holding the middle of the pipe and then swinging the molten glass around like the bottom of a pendulum...which looked way dangerous, but was quite effective.

Then you had something like this:


at which point you have to attach another pipe to the bottom (using a bit of molten glass as "glue") while breaking your glass off of the pipe. This is the dangerous part, since you don't want to have a lot of glass "glue" around; once you make the lip of the glass you'll be breaking the glass off of that pipe too -- but not enough glue and you can loose your glass to the floor or worse, to the furnace. We only had one glass end up on the floor, but in the end we ended up with three finished glasses!