Behind the Scenes

For those of you not familiar with glass-crafting, you can see some of the techniques below. The shot of me at what is called a glory hole in Corning is not fake: it is me and I was there. But I am a tourist in the hot shop. This was a class in sand casting, not glass blowing. The techniques I use almost exclusively rely on a kiln or a torch that is sort of like a bunsen burner.

Dropping Bowls

This is a lot of fun. You make a disc with a pattern on it and elevate it above the kiln shelf on a mold with a hole in it. You watch closely as the glass slumps down to the kiln shelf; when the bottom of the vessel is the size you want it to be, you lower the heat by skipping to the annealing segment of the firing schedule and cool the kiln. The piece will have a brim on it, which you remove before you polish the cut off edge.

Hollow Core Casting

Hollow core casting is the opposite of lost wax casting. With the wax, you melt it out to leave a void that you fill with glass. A hollow core mold is built around a plaster positive to hold the void. No glass enters where the plaster is. That results in a hole in the glass shaped like the plaster. In the case below, I have made a polar bear. The next challenge is to get the plaster out.

Inclusions in Pate de Verre

For this piece I first cast the mussle shells in little molds. I then pushed the glass shells into the side of a plaster pate de verre mold and tapped glass frit into the mold on top and all around.

Painting With Glass

This is a process I am trying to learn. Bullseye makes glass grains or frit in several sizes. I then resift through the frit to separate the smaller and larger pieces in each jar to that I have a larger number of fairly consistently sized pieces. Then you paint with it. Done well, it is wonderful. Done not so well it is less wonderful. I find that it is not as easy as you might think to transfer an image directly from a photograph onto glass.

This is one of my favorite penguin shots ever.

I have tried, but I have never produced a glass version that is even close.

Making Plans

Making almost any piece requires a lot of planning and trial and error. The image on the left shows an earlier version of the Animal Crackers cart: you can see that the mold for the roof pulled apart and plaster flowed between the layers of glass.