The Results of Our Glassblowing Day

in art •  6 years ago 

Hey guys

So last week, we went on a day's training at an artisan glassblowers. Today I went back over to Jonathan's studio and collected the pieces after they had cooled in the kiln for a couple of days and had the bottoms ground so that they stood up. Here are some images of the final results

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The first item on the left is my own paperweight - a swirl of colours mixed in the center and then 2 more glass collections on top, moulded by hand into a (near) perfect sphere.

On the right is @highwings paperweight. A little bit more egg shaped, but her bubbles are way nicer than mine.

In the middle is a small vase that @highwings and I were left to do totally on our own after the full day of training. Didnt turn out too bad.

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These are the two vases we made with Jonathan's help. On the left is my vase which is purple at the bottom and blue at the top. My shape isnt as good as @highwings one on the right, but I showed off with the fluting at the top of the neck which I was really proud of. They were blown from small cylinders of glass, turned around and the necks formed with the glassmaking tools.

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Finally, a couple of Xmas tree baubles. These started out life as a couple of glass cylinders, had blue colour added to them, blow to the shape of spheres and then rolled in silver leaf and blown again to give the cracked effect. Finally, the hanger was added by melting a drop of glass on top and then pulling it up and over :)

We are both really stoked with the final results - we are even going to make use of all the pieces in some way or another.

I'd recommend that everyone try this at least once in their lives if they can. Even for a non-artist like me, it was really great fun and an amazing experience.

Thanks for looking

Mark

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The pieces are really good. I would never have suspected that they were your first ever pieces. What a cool experience. Would you take it up as a hobby?

Id love to, but im going to need a bit more in the way of steem to be able to afford it

  1. A glass furnace costs £60,000 UK (diy can bring that down to £20k).
  2. You need a couple of smaller furnaces (unfortunately called the "Glory Hole") to keep the glass hot between working sessions
  3. Jonathan's propane gas costs to run those furnaces was £2500 per month :o

Maybe it's not the hobby for me :)

Oh, my goodness! I had no idea that it was that expensive to start up! No wonder there aren't very many glass artisians!

Wow! To be honest, this turned out way better than I was expecting! Kudos to you both! Thanks for sharing the results, between this and the original post really a nice piece of work all around. This is inspiring me to try similar. Really cool that you made these - glass is really a magical material, so commonplace but when you stop to think about its properties, pretty incredible.

It was truly one of the most satisfying yet scary (and painful) things I've ever done. Would love to do it again and if it wasn't sooooooo pricey (see above comment), id have a go at home.

The other cool thing that I really wish i'd taken a few photos of was a book that he had. I guess it's the glassblower manual - a photocopied, handwritten, laminated book with details of everything you can do with glass. It was phenomenal.

ooh cool. handwritten!

Hey! I want a colorful paperweight like that. Please! As soon as I saw it, they reminded me of the sea, and it would be beautiful to use it for my study documents 💙

You must feel lucky to have one, and especially to have done it yourself 😄

Wow, these are really beautiful! The paperweights are stunning and I must say you did a nice job on the fluting of your vase:)

We used to live in Vancouver, Canada, and in this touristy area was a professional glass blower; the place had a huge viewing area and I was continually mesmerized by the magic he created. I've never thought of giving it a try, but after your post, it's something I'm going to look into :)

Everything turned out so pretty! That must feel very satisfying.

looks great! I always wanted to do this activity!!! thanks for inspiring me @markangeltrueman

On a scale of 1-10 i rate it 19

Hey Mark.

I wanted to thank for for submitting my last article, a review of Dry County to curie. It means a lot to me that more people are seeing my work. I'm not sure if you checked back, but it's garnered over 500 upvotes. I really appreciate the kudos.

Cheers.
Nick