Bring the Heat: George Kennard makes an incalmo glass vase live

good morning everybody out there in the internet we're uh getting started my name is george kennard and i'm doing the live stream this morning and i have g brian jook uh christopher shell and catherine ayers helping out amanda sterling is gonna be the moderator so if you guys have any questions if there's anybody out there listening you can uh type in any questions you want to know and we'll try to answer them so i'm going to try to keep the mic on as long as i can and we're going to make a big uh round and como bottle today and we have an example in the front gaheji so uh we made one yesterday as a practice to make sure we could fit it in the time frame and we were pretty close so i needed just about an extra 10 minutes so i started the overlay this morning so i have white with aurora which is like a light peach color right now under this gather of clear see brian has a set of canes we're gonna roll up on this catherine can you bring over those pie calipers so i have some calipers here i'm going to measure this and make sure it's the right diameter while g brian picks up the uh the canes heats those up thank you so i pre-made a bunch of parts that are in a pickup box or in an oven that are right now they're sitting at 950 degrees so i'm going to make one cup with this pattern call it the wig lag pattern this is a pattern that's widely used in the flameworking community and i really like it and i thought that i would try it at a large scale so they flipped the canes once i've got the right diameter over here i set the calipers a little bit smaller because they're going to squeeze those canes together before i roll them up that'll make sure that they're all fused together and hopefully they meet on the other side so i think they flipped it once this time they'll probably make sure that they're fused together i'm just kind of in a holding pattern here uh heating up my clear glass i want to make sure it's soft enough where they stick pretty well [Music] so there's little pieces of metal that hold the canes together until they're tack used called peretti see brian just flip those off just give me the nod so he's going to take a quick little reheat and i'm going to go over and roll these up so we're going to roll them up over at that bench there amanda somebody up in the up in the cage jason i was just curious to see if they're adjusting the cameras all right so here goes the cane roll up i just want to make sure there's no kill wash on this i'm going gonna take a quick little flash make sure that they're all fused together now where they meet i haven't uh touched them together all the way yet so i'm gonna do right here just give it one little roll make sure that they're lined up perfectly and now i'm going to start to heat them a little a little more and uh blow the bubble all the way through to the end so i've done this seven times for the pieces that are in the box so there's a double cup there's a single cup and there's a quadruple cup so this this takes a little bit of time probably about 20 25 minutes to get this pattern for one single cup now i'm going to put a little puff of air into the end of the rod and marver the sides of it so it pushes that colored bubble all the way to the end george katie hubs mom is watching she says hello hey good morning chris of g she said hello to everyone so just say no [Music] so the bubble's starting to get soft i can see when i puff into it it starts to blow up in the center so i can see the clears all the way to the tip now so now i'm going to get it really hot marble it down into a smaller diameter and then i'm going to pull and stretch it into a long tube and that's when i'll start heating and twisting the pattern towards myself first and then away from myself with the next line directly up from there when you're picking up canes like this i think the really the most important part is to make sure you don't trap any air bubbles in it when you roll them up actually those canes are like pencils so there's a groove in between each one that's why i'm marvering in the center pushing it down pushing the air out the front in the back now it's starting to get nice and warm all the way through it [Music] by making the diameter smaller it also makes it thicker which will make it easier to twist and then melt back together can you bring over the dremel tool maybe i can do it over there it's right over here the one with a wide tip hi heather yeah it's just got one little stripe of of a kiln watch on one of the canes and i can take this little dremel tool and buzz that right off now so i'll let it fall off center and i flip it over and i'll i think that's pretty much it perfect thank you [Music] our tiniest fan is watching one of our local glass makers aaron jack and his wife sonia just had a baby good friends of george and baby talia is watching from home and benjamin benjamin yeah benjamin comes in all the time when we live stream so this is where i stretch the tube and now i'm going to start to heat it and twist it nice to do this while the tube is still hot because i can just give it a little heat in a specific area and that'll want to twist right up very easily this saves a lot of time as soon as i got that one done i can go right above it and heat the next one and twist the opposite way jason when he reheats in the in the heating oven can you get a nice shot of the the piece that he made yesterday that is like the piece that he's going to be making today here in the front so george has been working on this for a few weeks now he had to pull all the cane and then make all the different cups to prep for this so this is um he's already got hours and actually weeks of work already put into this beautiful piece so this part i think is really important to show people just so they can see how the patterning is all done once i have this all set i'll make this into a cup and that's how all of these pieces are put together by making a single cup joining it with another cup and i have it all set where i've already made one cup that's got four of these put together one cup that's got two of these sections put together and then i got a single in there which i'm going to attach to this and we'll talk about that when we get to that part but this usually this takes a little bit of time to in order to make something you know this complicated uh you really especially if you only have two hours you have to figure out [Music] yeah all the whole process ahead of time i don't twist them really too much in the beginning because this is all going to get compressed this long tube is going to get shrunk back into a nice thick cup so when you do that everything really uh gets exaggerated yeah so catherine just brought over this this is what it's going to end up looking like he'll shrink this long tube down into this thick cup and that's what is going to join together so the end right here is pretty important i want all of these cups to have a really nice termination point so they all come together to a nice little tiny section so i use the jacks to give that last little twist squeeze it down give it one more little heat so i can cut it right down to a tiny little section so here's the piece he made yesterday a lot of the pattern you can see one of these sections is one of the cups that he's making right now so just this one section is what he's making now he's gonna join four and then four on the bottom so eight all together of these cups and in the process of um in combo this cup here already has two joined together and he's made a cup out of the two so you can see it's got purple on one side and green on the other side and then eventually they'll all come together to create this beautiful vessel this is gonna be the similar to the final product today but you can see how that pattern stretches and it's really beautiful zigzag lines or wig rack lines can you hook up that air hose thanks g so this is the newest piece of equipment that we're using it's uh different this is our auto inflator we have a blow hose hooked up to the end of the blowpipe and i can add a little bit of air and i do this so the end of it i can inflate and keep that bubble all the way to the tip i'm going to use the torch to heat the backside here so so george has done a lot of prep work because two hours he needs more than two hours to make all these parts and all these pieces and so he wanted he did want to show everyone how he got this wig wag design so he's going to only be making one cup so in the pickup oven he's got a cup that has four cups already put together a single cup single color cuff and then a double color cup so he's going to add one of the single ones to this cup make a cup out of that add that double cup to the other double cup and then add the quadruple cup to the other quadruple cup in there giving us these eight sections of color um in the final piece so in the whole two hours he's got it all timed out he's going to be able to do all of that blow the vessel and finish the piece yep who makes our tools we have tools from many different tool makers so we have tools from italy carlo dona we have tools from japan the maruko tools or jacks cutting edge shears gym more shears we've got old tools from steuben some of those were custom made we've got wooden blocks i'm not sure where we get our wooden blocks from we get some tools from tools and pipes from spiral arts so we get tools from all over our auto inflator was um designed by our technical staff so we do have a technician we have a couple that can create certain tools for us as well for different tools glass makers prefer different tool makers and so we have a wide variety of tools from different makers all right g pretty close yep get ready to pick up that single here in a second i'll have chris bring the punty yeah you can bump it up 1050 right now perfect so as we're making this piece the oven the pickup oven that we're using to heat up the cups that i pre-made uh 950 is a pretty good temperature to hold the cups at where they're not going to get too hot and soft and stick to the shelf but we have to remember to heat the oven up to 1050 or sometimes even 1100 in order to get them hot enough to pick them out of there and go into a reheating furnace that i'm using like right now this one's set at 2100 degrees so there's too much of a temperature difference there the cup will crack and break when you go into the reheating furnace so we always make sure we turn that up to at least 10.50 and when that's up to 10 g brian's going to pick up that single cup so it's another cup just like this with a different color on the inside now as he's doing that i'm going to finish this up chris is going to bring over a punty and these canes are right on the surface so what i do is i have chris bring a little bit of extra clear that i stick on here so i can remove the clear by heating it and trimming it off and that way it doesn't take any of the pattern [Music] so we're going to flip this cup around so i can work on the top of it go ahead chris got three quarter a little bit of clear off the tip so now this is all shrunk back and you can see those lines really tightened up as i shrunk it back and made it shorter so now i'm going to make sure this is going to come off i'm going to start drizzling water right here on the jack line this construction is the jack line this is where we want it to break free is that ready g so george's uh my master glassmaker has been working with glass for about 30 years and so he's got lots of experience working and he's going to make this whole process look very easy and what you're seeing is not an easy process this is actually a very difficult process and lots of work has already gone into this but he's going to make it look pretty easy because he's got years and years of experience he's one of the senior members on our team i think when people think of the corning museum of glass one of the names they think of is george kennard the glass maker from the corning museum of glass and george is very well known we were talking yesterday he was practicing one of his um live streamed demos had how much 3.2 million views one of his videos is the giant dragon stem goblet yeah so the museum does a lot of different programming and i think this fall they wanted something a little different so every wednesday they call this series bringing in the heat so they're going to have four gaffers that work here at the museum do a live stream and then the next wednesday or every other wednesday we do what's called uh you design it we make it so kids can design something out of glass they draw a picture and we'll make it out of glass for them so that's really fun too all right you brian's gonna pick up the next next cup george put all these cups in here last night i think and brought him up to about 900 degrees slowly overnight so we're going to be picking up all these cups out of this pickup oven so when i break this cup off the canes don't go all the way to the edge so i tweeze it out and i can cut back in so the canes are all the way right to the edge of the piece now chris is going to help me push this back and thicken it up and uh try to make it the same size as the cup that she brian just picked up out of the oven hey catherine can you take one of these uh calipers when you get a chance to and um just take a quick measurement on that okay perfect thank you are you going with the firefighters uh yeah yeah thanks chris yep push a little bit that's the size right there catherine perfect where'd amanda go she's right over here i want to see if uh my oldest daughter chelsea's watching okay find out she's supposed to be in class right now but she's studying from home good well you taught her how to multitask right i did well i hope i did yep it looks like we're pretty good gee you want to this was right on the very edge g when you measured this i'll switch with you yeah i think we're good so now they're going to join these two cups together they want to make sure that the cups are just the right size amanda george wants to know if his oldest daughter chelsea is watching oh yes my sister-in-law what's the one tool you couldn't live without george the one tool i couldn't live without have to be the blowpipe gravity [Music] yeah you can't blow glass without a blow clay i'm almost there gee or a furnace oh that's a good one uh there was a lamp worker named kurt walstad and he did this technique uh really probably the best and uh i really loved his work i love his work and yeah so that kind of inspired me to try to do something similar flip turn so george likes to step outside the bench and add the cup one more time so he brings over the cup and he sticks it on from outside the bench when i put these two cups together too there's no hole now so you know the pressure can build up inside if you heat it too much i try not to get the seam too hot because now as we're in the reheating furnace that pressure will start to build and it'll start to blow out where it's hot all right g can i see that for a sec i'm just going to squeeze this together you can see the seam is real hot so just for a little insurance i can squeeze it down make sure they're lined right up and uh they're not going to start to blow out right there where that connection is so now this is just a series of adding cups together and once i have it shaped to a nice round ball shape we're going to do what's called reversing the access so i'm going to pop a hole in the side of it where the seam is we're going to add a little collar and we're going to flip it around so these cups are running on the opposite axis so i have to kind of reshape the whole thing i'm also going to get rid of that clear that's at the end of it [Music] when he punties these cups he cut he leaves a little clear behind because the color those canes cane pattern is right on the surface of the glass and so if the punty were to remove a little bit of glass it would remove a little bit of that um those li that line pattern so he always leaves a little bit of clear on there and then just removes it now and then you can see what is being pulled off so if you look at these sort of areas where the lines come together it goes right to the middle and if he punted right to that it might remove a little bit of that color and the white would show through but by leaving that little bit of clear he's got that color that comes all the way to the middle now george is one of our glass makers who likes to work really large he makes a lot of large pieces and works on a scale that might be difficult for most glass makers but he's got lots of practice doing it and he's very good at it and we have a question from home what is the biggest piece that you've ever worked on i think it would have to be the pumpkins that are out right now in the back of the truck and also the snowman family they're about the same size yep yeah so he's um for the museum every year we put out a little glass display that's pretty seasonal and right now on display here at the museum are the world's largest glass pumpkins and so they're out in the shops or the courtyard entrance and i believe each one of those pumpkins weighs a little over 75 pounds or so 85 85 pounds which is a very heavy piece of glass they had special ovens there's actually a video online you can google the world's largest glass pumpkin and you'll see the team see where you're on the team see brian was on the team chris was chris on the team you know tom ryder one of our glassmakers was eric meek john caldwell smith this is the part here where i have to open it up now and uh make a hole so i'm heating one specific area and i'm going to use these tweezers to [Music] to pick it open so i push in and kind of spread it out that's making it thinner and once i have it thin enough just by adding the torch the pressure on the inside will usually pop it [Music] it's close okay g whenever you're ready so g brian's made up a collar on a flow blowpipe so we're going to attach this to it perfect make sure it's closed up i'm going to add a little bit of water to this little clear button and break that off all right gee i'll clean this up once chris brings you the punty you can grab the next one so we're a half an hour 32 minutes into it and we've got the first two cups put together we're gonna add these two cups to another set of cups in there the next part we're gonna reverse that and then the last one is we're gonna stick it on to a section of four cups so the by reversing these um each one of these sections of color you can see where the lines kind of come together in a swirl and the the wig wag is kind of raiding out from the center if he didn't reverse the axis on these cups instead of that pattern you'd see this pattern so you'd see just the zigzag so to get that sort of swirling into the center look he's got to reverse the axis on those cups making the tip of the cup the side of the cup that makes sense [Music] [Music] when did you start making these pieces george uh i think about three years ago for my class so i usually teach a class at the studio of the quarter museum of glass in january and i started it's called an encomo class so i started making this pattern and doing it as a demo for the class thanks chris yeah so here at the museum over at the studio we teach classes and usually in that class there's either a technique or a style that is concentrated in the class sometimes it's just an all-around beginner class but then when you get into the advanced classes and intermediate classes they'll focus on one technique because you know advanced glass making is there's so many different techniques like this this cane patterning this encomo patterning and so george said it was one of his this piece actually involves many advanced techniques like the cane roll up and the cane patterning but then also that's this in culmo this switch axis in cualmo this is a piece that will take lots of prep work george has been working on these the canes and the cups for weeks now every day in the morning he'll come in and he'll make pull some cane make some cups so so he's going to condense this down into that nice little round sort of cup shape we call it a cup but it's not like a drinking cup or a tumbler it's a sort of a grawl cup or a thicker cup that he can join together to make a bigger bubble all right chris yep whenever you're ready g so we talked a little bit earlier he's got a cup that is about the same size as this one that's got the double pattern on it already so when he joins these two together it's gonna have those four sections of color two on this one and two on the one that g brian's going to be picking up out of the pickup oven and we were looking at these pieces yesterday george says he's got a little bit of purples and blues and pinks even an aurora color so this is going to be a really beautiful color palette right now everything looks orange a nice cherry red but this will brighten right up as it cools so chris is making the punty to flip the cup around that george has she brian's making the punty to pull the cup that george already prepared in the oven out of the oven and so to make a piece like this not only takes lots of years of experience but also a nice big team that's what's really nice about working here at the museum is i work with all of these folks for many many years and they all have a lot of experience i think everybody here on the floor has at least 20 years of experience so in class i would be doing what d brian is doing and give this piece to somebody to babysit just to keep warm so it's nice to be able to have somebody go over pick up the next one and have it the right temperature to attach to this one when i'm finished saves a lot of time so there's the cup coming out of the oven thanks chris and he's gotta run over to the oven they're going from a 1000 degree oven to a 2000 degree oven so the quicker you get in that oven the less likely the the less likely that will crack and break so george said pull that oven right up close to the we'll move the oven over to this side of the shop so it's closer to the the hole that g brian will be using instead of running across the whole studio i think one of the trickier parts too is pulling those cups out of the pickup box because they're heavy yeah he's probably got about probably six pounds of glass but he's got to pick it up with a punchy that's going to hold on to it but just at the right temperature so it doesn't get out of control when he's trying to go to the reheating furnace yeah so when you set out there's certain pieces you could make with probably any glass maker but when you set out to make a piece like this george knows he needs glass makers who are used to working large pieces so chris angie bryan are very good at hauling around large masses of glass and so you kind of have to pick a team for the size work that you're making so these guys have lots of experience lifting heavy pipes there's certain ways you move around with more glass on the end of the pipe and ways you hold your body so you don't get injured when i start adding cups together like this too i need to trim back to where the white is right to the edge of the lip get rid of anything that's going to make the piece not a not a good piece we'll put this one a little bit on together a little bit colder okay g so they took a caliper reading of the one g brian pulled out of the oven so as george opens this cup up he can measure that reading to make sure they're the same size and because they're joining these two cups together in that and calm all process the edges have to be really straight and flat so they come together really nicely so that's what they're working on here they're using that wooden board to push that lip back leaving it nice and flat nice and straight before we started the demonstration this morning i was looking at the cups that were in the box and the one that g brian has on the end of the stick right now was a lot bigger and i just knew that it would be harder to use a larger cup so we picked that back up and we shrunk it down and compressed it so it's thicker it'll be more manageable once i stick it to this piece now these colors also react differently with the heat so as i heat these up one gets a little hotter faster than the other one so this really helps that chris is pushing it back and i'm papering it and that's keeping everything nice and straight that looks really good chris where's that caliper this is the one i think we're close gee yep so they've got the caliber reading but it's always nice to just hold the two together to make sure that they're really close so also it's a little difficult sometimes to see which color is on which half i want to put these two where the darker colors are on the opposite side so whenever you're ready g i'll switch with you perfect yep that's the red and flip it and flip turn a beautiful stick they gotta remove one of the pipes now so they add a little bit of cold water a light tap it pops right off thanks chris you folks in the audience have any questions all right yep this is the four colors now so each cup had two cups in it it's pretty hard to tell because everything is hot it looks orange but you can kind of tell by the little bull's eyes so there's two there's two and all together there's four so this cup will either be the top half or the bottom half of the vessel and he's got the other cup that has the four colors in the oven they'll join the two together one will be the top and one will be the bottom of the piece [Music] so now they're going to do the same thing they did when they have the two cups together start to heat everything up and then poke the hole and reverse the axis again awesome so so george was introduced to glass right out of high school he answered an ad in the paper he went to the job and it was a glass shop not the kind of glass shop he thought it might be i think that it was maybe a glass shop that installed windows or something but it was a glass artist looking for some help so it was a leon apple applebaum yup leon applebaum this video is called studio and how long did you work there george for five years five years that's where he got his introduction to glass making yep so we had a question from home is george planning on gathering over this so he's going to take this cup reverse the axis join it to the other cup and then once he gets both of those cups together he's going to gather over it i can't tell you how many how many times okay d you want to make a calendar once maybe twice it all depends g said four times that's a big piece we're gonna need some more help i know the one he did yesterday he gathered on once they have to imagine like these cups are small but they're super thick so he already has quite a bit of glass in just one of these cups what you're gonna need so these cups themselves weigh quite a few pounds i don't paper it back i think this will be the last one i'm gonna pop the hole he uses this newspaper pad that's folded up soaked in water to kind of push and condense this thanks [Music] [Music] so again he's using that hot torch just to heat one specific area and you can see that it's getting hotter because it's starting to glow a little bit when he takes the torch away you can see it's glowing now the glass is really hot and soft there and he's going to just take those tweezers and pinch it open chris is shielding his hand from the heat this glass very hot throws off a lot of heat it's a hot torch that's very similar to the torch they use for the flame working process this one's just hand held and flame working you would have your torch fixed to the table pointed away from you and you would work with rods of glass in the flame but in the hot shop we like to use a handheld version of that and we can heat certain spots really well to be able to get the glass hot enough to be able to pick this hole he'd have to go into that furnace meanwhile everything else would get hot as well and so it's nice to use this little hot torch too to heat that one spot oh that's okay maybe a little bit narrower g so i just want to make sure these are gonna fit together nicely from here that's it so these thicker pieces you would have to change the annealing cycle and there's a formula a formula you know if you had a really thick piece of glass there's a formula that you can calculate what your annealing cycle would be but these pieces they're about you know an inch and a half thick so it's probably a couple days it's not too much we're not talking you know when you're talking about thicker work it's like the hundred pound paperweight that's solid glass and the museum's collection made by josh simpson weighs 107 pounds and the annealing cycle for that one was about three to four months and so an inch to an inch and a half it's not going to really be too much of a difference and once he makes this vessel it's actually going to blow out relatively thin not real thin but thinner so we won't have to do a real special annealing cycle for this we can do a standard you know two day cycle or so if it was solid then that's when we'd have to start calculating the annealing cycle and things would start to get trickier more tricky when you're using solid work or combining blown work with solid work that's when the annealing cycles become tricky or difficult to figure out so this is them just removing that little bit of clear left behind from the punty [Music] so not only has george worked with glass for 30 years but he's being working here at the museum being a gaffer here at the museum he's worked with hundreds of different artists we host a lot of different guest and throughout the years george has worked with so many of those artists and what happens when you work with these different artists is you learn so much and so as he works he's probably picking up little tricks from all the different master glass makers he's worked with over the years all right only one more in call mode to go nice and i think when people come to the museum and they know george is on the team they know they're in good hands because he's got so much experience and he's able to you know work with a lot of glass and move around a lot of glass and so i think there's a lot of people that come in and know that george is on the team and then feel really comfortable working in the shop and knowing that he's there to help them out [Music] i'll block this one up chris [Music] thank you [Music] so he's using that block to kind of condense this down into that nice little bullet shape right now it's a little oval from squeezing those together and making sure everything was nicely together so now he's got to condense it again to get that nice little cup shape or bullet shape [Music] no george got his um his start at a glass shop up was it prattsburg in france for new york prattsburg new york a studio i can't remember the name of the studio it's a hodge glass studio leon applebaum that was the glass artist and george got a job there right out of high school and learned glass making there then he where did you go from there george i went down to naslo glass which was owned by lewis olson on market street so that was my second production job and uh the last production job that i had was at vitrix hot glass studio on market street also then you came over to the museum yep then i started teaching classes at the studio i was actually the first artist in residence there i think that was in 1997 and then i started working at the hot glass show soon after that nice i know i took my first glass making class from george back in 2000 or 2001 i think carl did too carl was in the class yeah yep were you guys both in the same class i wasn't i was in the class with harry that harry taught with carl but i'm not sure yeah yep i was very intimidated it was carl and all these older guys and i was in kind of in the mix and i was very intimidated with my [Music] yeah george teaches here at the studio and at pilchuk haystack maybe not hey what was it um penland yeah but that's all kind of come to a a pause for for now and so judges we could this is like taking a mini workshop with george he's kind of explaining what he's doing one more little peek you can ask him questions quick yep quick little heat and we'll be ready to go so is that big blowpipe up with the red tape on it yep is there another one with blue or white tape on it for the punty there is yes so they're gonna have to transfer this a few times onto another few blow pipes so they've used a lot of punties so far and a couple blow pipes but for the final piece they have to make sure they have a big enough blowpipe for the amount of glass they're going to be gathering and so he's got a very large blowpipe and a second large blowpipe that they'll use for the punty as well yeah chris if you can give me a nice boil too yup because i'm gonna break it off of his pipe and i'm gonna pick the end of it and make the collar on the front so perfect so they've got that condensed down into that cup shape now it's time to flip it around and open it up so chris is going to start to work on that can you turn that box up g [Music] any questions from anybody at home amanda that's perfect so [Music] so it's not going to be much longer before they get this flipped around and opened up so see brian's already working on the punty to pull this the the other cup that has the four colors already joined together in the oven out what's nice about this one is that we talked about it yesterday and we're not going to reverse the axis on this because we're going to stack four on top of the other if you think about it i could have reversed the excess here but you really end up with the same thing so [Music] all right [Music] [Music] um so i think we're actually a little bit ahead from than from yesterday g brian thinking about maybe five or six minutes [Music] [Music] perfect [Music] [Music] wow my [Music] one more trim uh blowing into a dirt hole yup okay the question we had a question from home was the most bizarre glass making technique you've ever seen and he said it was they were out in uh boucher with a little glass program they do out in france and george was out there and they blew glass into a dirt hole and chris said the most strange glassmaking technique that he's ever seen was when they encased a dead frog in glass yeah pretty gross i remember when our boss got the email of chris telling him what they did that day and chris was like never in my glass career but i think i would have encased a dead frog in hot glass yeah i can't imagine i'm almost ready g i'm gonna open this up just a little bit more [Music] so again they're just making sure that those two lips are nice and flat so that the two cups being put together go together really well in a nice seam bob schweitergall is watching all right bob go ahead push bob is one of our glass making friends he worked here at the museum he did our ship program for many years traveling around the world on a cruise ship blowing glass at sea and then he spent a few summers with us here at the museum as well is he blowing glass everyone on the floor said hi bob carl g ryan chris george and myself you are here our old intern benjamin ewing tunes in for a lot of these live streams so hey how close are you always fun to yep i'm ready chat with our old friends jeff's watching from his desk in the offices we'll be sure to let you know if we need a little extra help he'll run out george allen eaton from chicago yeah from chicago george does a lot of our um well not only the teaching that he does in many of the glass shops glass studios and glass schools but george has worked here at the museum for what we said 15 years and he does a lot of our outreach that we do whether it's the hot glass the mobile hot glass show or the roadshow the glass bars the cruise ships and so for a while um he is one of the kind of this supervising glassmakers that kind of travels with the roadshow if the roadshow goes somewhere george usually goes along so he's you know been to florida chicago did you go to australia when they went didn't get to go to didn't get to go to australia [Music] i did get some kangaroo jerky dough oh they brought you back turkey that was nice though yeah the glass art society conference was out in adelaide australia just overall i'm gonna ship the road show over and since then that was so difficult that they bought a few shipping containers and so they were um george and chris were just talking about the program that we do at babache and instead of sending they send a shipping container with the whole shop in over for that so any any outreach that we do now that has to be shipped overseas we don't send the roadshow we send a shipping container hot shop we just got a fancy new roadshow they retired the original roadshow and so a few years ago now we're working on this fancy brand new truck when it's safe to travel again you might see the roadshow traveling down the mobile hot shop traveling down the highway it's one of our outreach programs george might not be too far behind it okay put a good heat a little more on the front and i'll pop the hole so this is all the cups this is the last of the cups right so we've got all the pattern work now in this egg shaped bubble so now it's just going to be they've got to pop a hole in it to get a blow pipe on there hey chris maybe you can take it after g drops it off and g can you make up the collar and remember we're going to make it a little differently today see how it has that crease line [Music] they've got to get that nice and hot and melt away that crease line because george is going to gather more clear glass over top of this and if that crease line is still there they'll trap a ring or a bubble so they want to make sure this he wants to make sure this is nice and smooth can you give me a bit more on the front key before he gathers over it let's try that you want to come back me up chris thanks carl so he's going to pop one more hole in this g brian's working on the collar which is a little bit of glass on the end of a blob so he's gathering that little bit of glass on the end of the blowpipe and what he'll do is he'll let the glass kind of fall back to the edge of the head of the blowpipe and then he'll pop a little bubble through the thin glass and so it will be a blowpipe with a big massive glass that will act as the collar that will hold the piece take a quick reheat chris i'm going to go on the outside that's good chris so close start to see the white [Music] okay how's it looking there you go it's got a nice hole there yeah yep perfect can you see out the front a little bit just beautiful pattern from that camera inside the reheating oven a little bit not much we're close i like how all the cups come together it creates that sort of look whenever you're ready gee so we stick that collar right against the piece right in that hole it's just going to make sure it's really sealed on there yep that's okay that's good yeah yeah no this is going to be good you ready we'll remove it from the punty and the piece has been flipped around for the second to last time that's it you gotta punch it you should call this the flip-flop wig wag you said to flip this thing around so many times so g this time i'm going to squeeze down on that oil clear and then we're going to take the button off and then we're going to get hot so as soon as you think i can squeeze it a little bit while i'm squeezing this chris can you torch the bottom clear with the hot torch we've got to remove that little bit of clear off the end and that will become the bottom of the vessel okay so we'll clean this up make sure everything's nice and smooth out gather over it start to blow the vessel and then they'll flip it around so what's on the blowpipe now will become the top of the piece and the area they're torching that's going to become the bottom of the vessel so he's using this newspaper pad carl is shielding his arm from the heat your arm is very close to that hot glass and as this piece becomes larger and as they add more glass to it you're going to see a lot more of that shielding happening because it will throw off quite a bit of interest so what i'm thinking it's going to preheat that steam like i said we don't want to he doesn't want to trap any air when he gathers over it and so he's going to preheat this before he goes back into the glory hole so they can really melt out that seam and yesterday he's on block and it melted and hit the top seam they did a trial run yesterday because the last time george made one of these pieces he said was last last january in one of your classes yeah so he hasn't made a piece this scale or with his complexity in quite a while so they did a trial run yesterday to make sure it went well and it went really well we have the piece sitting out here in the front so you can see as well this piece probably weighs right now i haven't touched it so i'm i have a good idea because i can feel the weight of the cups but g brian or george what would you say this piece weighs right now i'd say 15 pounds 15 pounds really what would you say jesus more the pipe itself weighs about eight pounds yeah let's try that um [Music] it's okay for a second chris maybe 15 to 20 pounds but that's gonna feel a lot heavier because it's moving around and you're holding that weight away from your center of gravity it's going to get a lot heavier pretty soon because they're going to add more clear glass over top of it and because they have such a massive surface area it's going to pick up a lot of clear glasses so it's going to become a lot heavier here pretty quick [Music] yeah i probably every time anyone sees george make anything they always want to know how how heavy it is i can tell you it's always really heavy it's pretty smooth it's never real light we don't have much time let's do it one more time just real quick yep i'll pay for it this time right there on that seat i can tell you if you're turning the pipe and carrying around it feels like a thousand pounds so saying it's you have to add on that extra three or four feet that you hold it away from your body that adds a few pounds and then while keeping it turning you'll notice as he lifts it back to the bench he's got to keep it turning otherwise it'll fall off center especially because he's getting it so hot all right let's try that tree so a lot of the times you'll hear george say you know work smarter not harder and so that he'll really utilize the team and because he does work larv he has all these he knows all the tricks and everything to keep himself safe and from being injured but it does [Music] happen so chris is just blowing this smoke out of george's face when you have a nice big team like this you got extra hands real food it's real food they can spoil george carl's keeping his hands nice and cool chris is blowing the smoke out of his face see brian's lifting the weight one strip just one so it looks like now they're getting ready to gather over it they're just gonna cool this yeah we don't need to bubble off that over there blowing on it with that compressed air a little bit we're gonna gather over it pretty crazy huh we haven't done much gathering because he's been using cups that he uh previously made so they did a few gathers but this will be the first big gather can we play that gather animation for those of you who don't under um aren't familiar with this term gathering there's our furnace and it holds about a thousand pounds this is a nice big furnace george can make lots of big work out of this big furnace and it's a pool of hot glass inside there that sits in a big ceramic crucible he goes in and kind of dips it out like honey out of a bowl very hot honey it's a lot heavier than honey too isn't it so they're cooling off the pipe they're going to throw this into the furnace yeah it's pretty heavy i can tell they're lugging it around [Music] all right so g cooled the pipe for george george is going to take this gather so all this work this is what it comes down to is one gather and make the final form so the one thing about putting all these cups together is that there's a really big bubble inside this now so i want to make sure that i gather over it at the right temperature if it's too hot when i go in together all that glass that i'm going to gather out of there will heat that core bubble up and it'll get really out of control and hard to to manage so i like to let it cool down enough where i can support the gather to come out cool the pipe at the pipe cooler and come over here by the time i get back to the bench it's just starting to heat up on the inside so i think that's the easiest way to do it if you can time it to get to that point yeah everything's happened pretty slow up until now now the pace is going to really pick up more the team's gonna start to jump in so we got a half an hour to finish this up before the channel shuts off there he goes it goes in turns in one direction kind of comes level the glass drips off now watch when he comes out he usually strips a little bit off you can really see how this glass moves like honey the pot of water is boiling the bucket is glowing and there is our nice big beautiful gather that pattern is magnified the lens of thick clear glass makes it look like that pattern is magnified amanda's gonna get a nice detailed shot check our web our social media pages for pictures of this piece soon once it comes out of the oven we'll take pictures and if it comes out the way george hopes i believe this piece will be for sale yeah we don't sell any pieces we usually make here at the museum but for this bring the heat demonstration we're going to be selling these few pieces made by our artists i can feel it starting to get a little soft on the inside which is perfect i'm going to come over and cool the tip can you paddle the bottom just a little bit chris so that bubble in there he cooled it off to gather on it but like you said it's starting to heat up that's good and that's what they want they want this all to become really hot and gooey and soft again [Music] the tip of that bubble will become the bottom of the vessel so they are cooling it so that it doesn't become too thin so by cooling it as he inflates it or blows it up they'll be able to keep that thickness at the bottom which will make this very stable should we turn the pressure up at the bottom so we've got these two valves on the back of the bench here and that control controls our auto inflator and so we can dial it right down to a little bit of pressure he can turn it up so it's very much like if you were to blow through the end of the pipe yourself how much air comes let's do that gee get out of the i want to pay for the bottom we're going to torch the top a little bit to get the jack line started yeah yeah i want to just make sure that this is nice and smooth too here at the bottom so we papers with the newspaper papers the tip now usually you'd hear them say glow blow soft blow hard but because he's using that auto inflator with a blow hose hooked up to the end of the pipe all he's going to do is step on a foot pedal so you're going to have to watch to see that the glasses are clean should we take a quick heat yeah but before this you'd hear him say flow somebody would be blowing through the end of the pipe but we're gonna keep our masks on we're going to not put our mouth on the end of the pipe for now just to keep everybody safe we'll start with the light one jade katherine can you get ready with the hose yeah if we need it on the end so i'm gonna all right let's try it's heating it up chris is ready to shield and paddle i'm going to cut in that jack line and back they're also using gravity so they're holding it at that 45 degree angle which will stretch and elongate the shape plug it in and back all right you ready so he's stepping on that paddle you're going to start to see the bubble get a little bit bigger now we can do two things we can kind of tap on it or you can hold it down depending on how much pressure that was perfect okay let's uh take a heat stretch it blow it up awesome all right you said get a little more heat on there and let's blow it up no yeah it's pretty warm all the way through g so a little a little less yep we're good they know how hot the glass is by the way it starts to move and so by watching it kind of back when as they switch directions it'll start to kind of [Music] move back and forth okay they can also tell by the color when it's really glowing we know it's nice and hot if we were to start to see pinks and purples and blues we'd know that the glass is getting cold or chilly good with one more a little more heat i'm gonna puff this up all the way this is really beautiful [Music] so the canes he used a special type of glass called duro and when the glass is you can stretch it quite a ways and it'll keep that line shape if you use just regular glass color sometimes it can kind of bleed out or blur a little bit but that duro is really good for people who like to use this cane technique because those lines stay really clean and crisp yeah so i think he's got like in each cup he's got alternating white black and a purple cane for those of you here at the museum you're welcome to come down and check out the the cups and the piece that he made yesterday get a little closer look and you can see the canes so you're squeezing down that neckline now we can start to see some of those blues and purples and pinks i think that green color is a turquoise that might be a green color i'm not sure all right there's the piece that he made yesterday so now george is going it looks like they've got the shape remove it okay they've got the shape they're gonna transfer this off of the blowpipe onto the punty so this will be the last transfer you can really start to see those beautiful colors and patterns all the weeks of work that george put into these cups and pieces it's all coming together now look at that that's a really nice shot [Music] i would say that when george makes these pieces everyone is like how did you get those patterns like that because i think a glassmaker could look at this and say i see how you did that but i don't i think they're curious how he got the patterns to come to the swirl like that it was all that flipping around that he did all the reversing of the axis that he did i know the first time i saw one i was like had to look at it for a while and say how the heck did he make that so you know you've come up with a neat design when glass makers look at something and say how was that made okay one more quick flash all right so george has the punty ready says one more quick flash you'll hear a lot of communication between the team everything has to be done at the right time the right temperature and of course teamwork is really important all right so george is going to stick the punty on from outside the bench and whoop stick it right on there turn i'll use the strap of the jacks to kind of cool and straighten up yep back nice and easy chris turn nice and easy so now they're just going to let that punty kind of settle up they don't want to break this off too hot because it'll flop around on the panty see brian's heating her neckline because they're gonna cool more constriction fine that's good in order to break it free so we don't want it to be too cold he's going to add some water right along that neckline you take the pipe chris can you put the jacks on the jack line yep okay with a light tap it pops right off how about a big round of applause for a nice clean break yeah and there is our piece flipped around and a little hole we're just kind of coming up on the final stretch got about a little less than 15 minutes left which is a perfect amount of time to finish off the top of this i got it thanks i'll bring it back and i'm going to look at the front we might torch it a little bit i need to tweeze it down squeeze it down [Music] if he wasn't working under the the live stream i think is going to cut out right at noon nope but if he wasn't working on a time constraint he could um work on this you know as long as he like to get everything just the way he wants but i think he's gonna try to finish it up in the live stream time [Music] but there's not much he's going to leave it pretty closed off he's probably just going to clean chris can you pull that bench away in the torch back a little bit i want to work from the outside of the bench so he's going to work outside the bench so he's having chris kind of pull everything back so he has a lot of room to get in there and work from the outside of the bench where's those flat twists so he's gonna pull the lip so just pull the edge with the tweezers pulling it thin pulling it straight let's squeeze it down with the jack now he's got it pulled out he's going to take the jacks and kind of squeeze squeeze it down and pull it a little longer uh those are okay [Music] [Music] see that nice orange glow at the top nice and slow it's nice and soft there just gonna tweeze the lip faster back so you can see g ryan's turning the pipe back yep that's perfect george is using the jacks to kind of cut that down so you're gonna hear because he is the gaffer he's the person in charge you're going to see hear him kind of instructing he's still even though he's not turning the pipe he is in very much control of what's happening i had the camera on the inside he can even control the av booth thank you jason [Music] the person in charge so even jason up in the booth is listening to george out front back everybody's trying to make it so this goes really smooth back let's hold my koji [Music] okay quick flash i give it [Music] i need to put the jack line where i just torched just hold that paddle on the front like you said or like you did before thank you this is kind of fun because we don't usually have the gaffer miced up so you can hear some of the subtle conversation they have so as he's kind of explaining to chris what um that needs to happen perfect now he's got this compressed air in this wooden cone they're going to puff up the top so this is kind of like you're going to use a soffietta with the wooden nozzle on the end of that compressed air they put the wooden nozzle into the hole and he can puff up the top or the shoulder and i think he's going for that nice rounded look at the top so he can use this hot torch to preheat the top that way when he puffs into the vessel those shoulders will round out nicely it's looking good george thanks yeah i'm gonna leave that little neck there if i can okay so he wants to leave trying to leave that little neck there that little flowery part that he used to pinch and pull the lip that part will come off but not until he's got the whole thing kind of puffed up the way you want the neck heats the shoulders and then watch this puff right up [Music] a little more heat you can tell when you blow into it if it's not popping up as much as you want it's probably not as hot as he needs it yet so that's why you stopped pumping it right for that torch we don't really have any time to waste this glass heats up very quickly but it cools down just as quick and so at this stage in the game because the glass is a little thinner we don't have as much time as when it was thicker to work on it out here in the room temperature air because he goes from one tool to the other pretty quickly [Music] once they come out they'll start working on it right away here we go puffing it up some more [Music] i think the shape really makes this color pattern and design really pop [Music] george's work is usually very colorful with lots of patterning work i got lots of good advice though from all the teams usually my colors are bright orange bright yellow bright red george likes the color palette of red red orange yellow and so he pulled chris in for some color advice one more time gee [Music] yeah so this is gonna go into the oven pretty s pretty soon but amanda's gonna come back in a couple days when this comes out of the oven take a few pictures a couple of few still shots and then she'll post those on our social media site facebook instagram [Music] twitter [Music] and then when it comes out george is happy with it it's going to go right to the shops you can purchase it if you would love to take this beautiful piece home [Music] which i'm sure there's a lot of people out there who would because this is really beautiful boy we're really close i always think it's fun too if you watch something being made i want to knock this top off here and it's something that you can take home because it's like a not only did you see it being made but you have a nice story to go with it from good cruise and i believe the videos from this series bring the heat bringing the heat all those videos will be uploaded on our youtube channel so this was this will be a video that you can watch or tell your friends about and it'll be on youtube for carl can you open the doors all the way up and he goes in and out yeah and then when you go back to youtube to find this video you're going to find videos that george has done throughout the years so he's participated in a few other videos okay one went viral one he's got you know 3.2 million views or watches i think that was the 2300 where he made the really large hold on i'm going to drag this goblet and back he's going to trim a little bit off just a little tiny bit turn [Music] fire polish that cut edge away hold on one second flatten it out okay flash yeah please thank you a quick flash and chris rochelle is going to put out a silver suit maybe just a sweatshirt and he's going to put this away into our slow cooling annealing oven this is the saddest part of the demo because we don't get to see it for too long we have to wait a few days [Music] this is keeping it warm in order to get this off that punty they do have to create a little thermal shock and so he's applying a little heat with that hand torch to the area that they're going to shock it so that it doesn't shock it too much you know adding water to a hot piece of glass like this could be detrimental less than heat glasses just right so chris has the kevlar gloves on and the silver jacket and of course a face shield because he's going to be carrying this piece into the 910 degree a little bit all right so we'll do it this time personal protective equipment is [Music] required yeah we'll do it this time can you hold the uh jeff jacks on the yeah jacks or shears thanks catherine uh we oh yeah we'll hit the bottom of the torch can you hold the perfect are you ready chris and stop [Music] [Music] a light tap it pops right off they're going to fire polish the sharp edge away [Music] and into our slow cooling oven cool slowly overnight that's george kennard everyone a beautiful piece i'd like to thank you guys for sticking around and watching and uh yeah hopefully you enjoyed it [Music] uh [Music] um [Music] [Music] [Laughter] um

Channel: Corning Museum of Glass

Views: 2,146,250

Keywords: Corning Museum of Glass, glass, glassmaking, glassblowing, incalmo, encalmo, George Kennard

Id: znRRVhJjIHE

Length: 119min 17sec (7157 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020