"Teacher's Pet"

This month the Morean Arts Center has an exhibition called Teacher's Pet. They ask their instructors to chose one piece from one of their students to put on display in the exhibit. Doug chose one of my pieces for it. Yesterday the family and I had a chance to get down to the museum and check it out.

Here's me in my first public showing! The yellow, green and blue bowl is mine, the purple spinout is Dougs.

And what Doug had to say about me...

Instructor Assisted Studio

The past few times I've worked in the studio I've started feeling like I wasn't making any progress. I was making the same mistakes and my pieces were all pretty similar. I had some pieces that I liked but I didn't feel like I was growing. So last week I did a studio session with Doug, my instructor from the classes.

We spent a lot of time focusing on form and technique and it was immensely helpful. It was extremely helpfull and I think helped to get me back on track.

I started with just a clear vase. Doug did one first and then I did the same thing. This was to work on getting the bubble shaped properly and get the glass thickness nice and even.

The next two were spin outs. The first was a bowl, the second one was practicing a rondel (a plate). I think I'm spinning them out too fast as both of them had an edge that got away from me.

The past few times I've worked in the studio I've started feeling like I wasn't making any progress. I was making the same mistakes and my pieces were all pretty similar. I had some pieces that I liked but I didn't feel like I was growing. So last week I did a studio session with Doug, my instructor from the classes.

We spent a lot of time focusing on form and technique and it was immensely helpful. It was extremely helpfull and I think helped to get me back on track.

I started with just a clear vase. Doug did one first and then I did the same thing. This was to work on getting the bubble shaped properly and get the glass thickness nice and even.

Finally, I wanted to do a smooth bowl. On my third gather on this piece I didn't let enough glass strip off and it was really big. Too much for me to really work with to be honest, but this time I had Doug and he helped me along. When you have a lot of glass on your pipe, everything is much harder to control. The biggest issue is making the jackline because the glass is so thick. Piece came out great though!

Teacher / Student Exhibition

A couple weeks ago Doug asked me to give him a piece to put into the Teacher & Student exhibition that the Morean Art Center is doing. We chose my yellow and blue bowl from my last studio session for it. Should be fun seeing my piece at the museum! I don't know the dates yet, will post them when I do.

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!

Some new pieces

First, I picked up the two pieces that I made while assisting Doug in class last month. The first one was an example of using an optic mold in a simple paperweight. The second was just getting in some practice while the class was taking a break.

These next three are from my studio session last week. I bought some dichroic glass scrap to play around with. I started with a simple paperweight with some shards in it just to get a feel for how to use the dichroic without burning it off. You have to be very carefull with the heat exposure or the metal oxides burn away.

The next two pieces I was focusing on trying to get the thickness of the glass correct. They came out perfect in that regard. Unfortunately, the "plate" didn't spin out enough and has a funky shape because I didn't trim up the lip. And the foot cracked off of the blue piece when we were taking it off the punty. Oh well, them's the breaks I guess.

Assisting

A couple of weeks ago Doug asked me that since I wasn't taking another course if I would be interested in assisting him in his classes. He thought it would be beneficial for other students new to glassblowing to have someone else that was just starting out to talk to and have help them.

I was very excited about it and was flattered that he thought I'd progressed enough to be helfull as a teachers assistant. I won't be able to do it regularly, just here and there as Jen and I can juggle schedules.

Today was the first class for this session. Doug has only two students in this session, Rayna and Gail. We spent some time talking about glassblowing in general and then Doug had me demo a paperweight while he talked to the class about each step. Apparently all I really need is an audience because everything went perfectly. And I think it was the straightest jack line I've done to date! Afterwards I just hung around and talked "shop" with the ladies. I really enjoy acting as a mentor; I like helping other people and honestly I learn a lot myself. Hopefully the class got some benefit from me being there!

To top it off, Doug let me sneak in a piece on my own while they were taking a break!

It'll be a few weeks, but I'm looking forward to going and helping out again.