Glass Blowing...

Christmas came early for me this year, and it was AWESOME!!! James gave me a glass blowing class as a present and my class was this past Saturday. I have wanted to try glass blowing for a really long time. So I was extreemly excited for the chance to try it. In preparation for my class, I spent hours watching the professionals do it. Of course they make it look so easy. I had a really hard time going to sleep Friday night because I kept thinking about the class and what I wanted to try to make. I even printed up some samples of things I like to show to the teacher. The class it taught by an instructor named Gay Wynn and there are two students per class. The instructor was really nice and when I showed her the samples I liked she said she would teach me how to do it. So she did a demo piece that was a small version of the vase I wanted to create. Glass blowing is a two person job a lot of the time so she had me assist her on the demo vase. It was fun! Here are a couple of pictures of me working on the demo vase and the completed project.

After the demo was finished, she set us loose to play around and get familiar with the tools and equipment. While I was doing that I made a paperweight. Then she had me try blowing air into a project. I was doing great until I pinched off the air pocket in my project. So rather than scrap the whole thing she had me blow it as big as I could and then stick it back in the glory hole to shrink it back in on itself. So the picture below is the big bubble I blew.Then I put it in the glory hole and it shrunk back in on itself and made lots of cool air bubbles.Here is the finished product. I think it's pretty cool, even though it really isn't functional.After all that messing around it was time to get down to business and start on my big project. So I picked out some colors and started to work on it. I gathered some glass then touched it in the color I was using for the piece (white, blue and green). This is called blocking...it's where you use the wooden tools to center the glass on the pole. This is just a random picture of me with some glass. Here I am blowing the air into my vase. It was tricky to know how much to put in at a time. So thankfully the instructor was there to tell me when to stop.

It was so much fun to make my project! It was pretty intense there for a while once it started getting big and heavy to work with. I was glad the instructor was there to help me because I needed an extra set of hands a few times durring the process. Here is my finished product getting ready to go into the annealer (an oven that gradually cools the projects). And here is the final piece...I love it!

Here is a shot of all the pieces together. It was such a great day for me. I loved every minute of it. The only downside was that I was so excited about it that I had a hard time going to sleep that night because I kept thinking about it all night. Thank you James for the amazing pressent!