June 22nd Studio

Jeff and I had a rough night on this one. We both lost our main pieces. I ended up redoing mine, he worked on something else.

Mine was supposed to be a longer vase and wanted to work on thinning out the walls as well. First I blew my piece a little thin in one spot so I had to stop, couldn't thin it out any further. We puntied up and tried to transfer. Had a bad attachment and the punty popped off. While Jeff was getting a new one, I went to the glory hole to get a flash. Bad idea. The piece exploded in the glory hole.

I decided to redo the same piece and again had trouble blowing it out evenly. Instead of a vase, I ended up with more of a bowl shape. The piece came out good even though it wasn't exactly what I was trying for.

We each only got two pieces out this time. My second one was a paperweight that I wanted to spin out. Same technique as the one I tried a few months ago that flopped over. Didn't have quite as much glass this time and managed to keep it under better controle.

June 4th Studio

Sorry for the delay on this one. After picking up my most recent pieces, I realized I didn't put up my previous ones!

Three pieces from this session. My main piece was also the most instructive! I wanted to try a larger piece and was shooting for a vase. I also experimented with putting some cane in the optic mold to get a line pattern on it.

I jumped a little too far on this one. After my last gather, I should have let some of the glass strip off before coming out of the furnace (or stripped off into a bucket). I cooled my pipe and then sat down at the bench to start shaping it...and that when I lost control. There was too much glass dripping down, the pipe got heavy and lopsided so I couldn't turn it, and the next thing we knew, there was a puddle of molten glass on the floor.

To top it off, it landed on wax drippings so it also burst into flames! Yeah, exciting piece! We recovered from it, and then I proceeded to blow the piece too thin at the bottom. The piece came out sloppy, but we learned a lot from it.

Next I wanted to practice another cup. The focus of this piece was to work on thinner walls and nice clean base. Met all my goals on this one!

Finally, a small test. How fast could I get through a simple paperweight. This one took 15 minutes from start to finish. Definitely improving!