It's Over - What a Week!

Day 6 has come and gone, and the workshop at Corning with Giles Bettison has been completed.  Day 6 (or day 7 if you count the introductory dinner on Sunday evening) is usually the most hectic.  The day starts early and the students are busy making as much stuff as they can, trying out different techniques we've learned this past week.  Instead of working until 11pm, the day ends at 4pm with a full shop cleanup after that.  It took us about an hour and a half to completely disassemble and clean the hot shop, the cold shop, the glass cutting workroom, and anything else we might have made a mess of.  This is a really hard thing, but it is wonderful to walk in the shop Monday morning and have everything clean and shiny and ready to go.

Today I pulled one cane and made a small vase utilizing the "rollup" technique we learned this week.  The finished canes from yesterday are shown in the picture below.
 




















Here are three photos of the vessel I made yesterday.  One thing to note, I put in a signature murrine (a "J" in case you couldn't guess), but it has one problem.  I got the top/bottom thing correct, but I hadn't counted on the instructor wanting to flip the piece front to back.  Hence the "J" is backwards in the finished piece.

Note that these pictures were done by a professional photographer that the Studio brings in for students to utilize her services.  You can sign up for one hour time slots and it is great.  I brought a bunch of stuff to have photographed in addition to the pieces made during the session.  I post on those pieces in the next post.

 

Day 5 is in the Books

Well, the fifth day is now in the books.  Today was a lot of work.  First, we got to see the canes we made yesterday.  Here is a pictures of the "Ants" cane that I took four lengths of, bundled, and repulled into a new cane.  The four bars were tack fused in the glory hole, and then cased in clear before pulling down.  I think the final is somewhere about 3/4" in diameter.
























The cane on the left is the stack I made yesterday. This slice isn't all that straight.  I have quite a bit of this particular cane that is much straighter.  I've bundled four sections and have it ready to pull tomorrow (the last day).  Here is a picture.  Sorry for the poor quality but I was having trouble with the close up function on the camera tonight and it was low on battery life so I wanted to get a quick shot before the battery power ran out.  I will cover this in clear and keep it a square cane, I think.

Here are the other two canes from yesterday.  I really like the "window" cane on the left, even though the picture here isn't that good.  The stacked cane on the right is very colorful - again I apologize for the photo quality.

Maybe this close up will help.

We concentrated on rollups today - I made a small vase from the layout I posted about yesterday.  I changed it slightly from the picture.  It should be out of the kiln tomorrow morning, just in time for my scheduled photo shoot.  More on that tomorrow.

Finally, I created a simple rollout which I will create into a vessel tomorrow.  More to come.

 

 

I've Got Blisters on my Fingers

While only one finger, and it's a small blister - but I have it.  Burned myself very slightly tonight and it was all just a stupid mistake of touching a hot pipe at the wrong end with my index finger.  Stupid.  Now for the real story of today.  

The point of today was to pull more, stack more, cut some, restack some of the cut cane, repull it if necessary, and get stuff ready for tomorrow.  In the midst of all that we watched some demos, got a tour of the contemporary glass collection at the museum, and worked out butts off. 

The first picture is of the five canes and one slice off of them that are out of the kiln.  The "ants" one (as my family had dubbed it) was restacked and pulled today.  It'll be out of the annealer tomorrow morning.  

The next picture is of a set up for a rollup which will be rolled onto a core of clear and then blown out into a vase shaped vessel (or a close approximation thereof).  Check out that triangle cane.  That was a last minute decision as we'd been doing squares for the most part, and a few people did a round one (I did one today), but no one did any other shapes.  I think this clear cane will really be cool with the white (french vanilla, actually) border.



I put two more stacks in tonight for pulling in the morning.  The two pictures are below.  Sorry for the poor picture of the second one.  I didn't realize the camera didn't focus correctly until after they were in the kiln.  


Stay tuned - we have two days to go!

 

Day 3 - Pull, Cut, Pull

Day 3 is in the books.  We are now officially halfway through with the course.  Today we got to see what came out of the annealer from the pulls we did yesterday.  The are pretty good.  My whole goal for pulling cane was to master pulling square cane.  I've done a lot of round cane, but these are much harder to use in rollups, in fused blanks for slumping, or other general uses.  Square cross-sections are much nicer in this respect.  Here is a picture of me starting to heat one of the blanks to get it ready for pulling.

The next picture is of a 5" length of the cane and one 3/8" thick murrine off that cane.  The next picture after that is a close up of the two canes I pulled yesterday.

Today, we took four lengths of the square cane, wired four of them together with stainless steel wire to hold their shape during heating and the initial pick up.   I'll pull this into smaller canes tomorrow.  This is how it looks in the kiln ready to heat up for pick up.

Full Pull

I've just completed Day 2 at the workshop (Giles Bettison at the Studio of The Corning Museum of Glass).  A very long day indeed.  Today was pulling the canes from the stacks we created and loaded into the kiln last night.  We learned a ton about pulling cane, especially square cane.  I pulled both canes that I put in the kiln last night.  From the looks of it, they are pretty cool and everything worked as planned.

No pictures yet - too tired to download from camera!  I'll try to get a chance to take pics tomorrow.  I've got two more stacks ready and in the kiln before I left tonight.  We learned how to make "stuffed color cups" which will create some really interesting murrine with clear centers.  I got a stack of color ready for that as well.

Tomorrow looks to be another long day.  First, we'll cut up the large canes we pulled today and bundle them into new patterns for re-pulling.  We'll pull the stacks that are in the kilns right now.  Finally, we'll create more stacks.  Then we'll get down to business of slicing the bars into murinne for creating vessels from.


Stay tuned.