Glass Blowing

Last Sunday I took a glass blowing class here in Sacramento. It was pretty cool stuff and I think I would like to do some more of that. Actually it was not cool at all, it was pretty darned hot.- lots of furnaces and flames and blobs of molten glass and it was a hot day anyway.

The whole process was quite fascinating – a chance to work with a lump of molten glass on the end of a metal rod – sliding it into a furnace, bringing it out and working with it, adding color, heating it back up again in the furnace, working with it some more.

I got to produce three things – a paper weight (not much blowing there), a vase and a bowl. I didn’t actually produce them entirely by myself; it was more very close supervision by someone who knew what they were doing and who would wrest control of the project from me whenever we got to some particularly tricky maneuver (of which there were a few).


The whole experience was quite rewarding and the end results were not that bad - for a beginner anyway.