Eusheen Goines Guest Artist Demonstration

all right well good afternoon everybody welcome to the amphitheater hot shop here at the Corning Museum of Glass typically when we say the term hot shop we refer to a glass studio that has equipment like furnaces and reheating furnaces and we tend to work glass at a bench like this and work the glass off of long steel tubes and and rods we're doing something a little different in the amphitheater hot shop today we have a very special visiting artist working with us this is machine goings and he is visiting from Evergreen Colorado and yachine just finished teaching a class at our teaching facility across the parking lot the studio of the Corning Museum of Glass and he is renowned for very fine pattern work and I'll walk around with a finished piece that is pretty close to what he's going to be shooting for with the object he's working on today he has already been working all through the morning has about three hours of work already put into this piece and he's gonna be making a pendant and I'll come out and join you guys and show ya the sort of pattern work that we're after here so this this style of work machine is very notable for doing really fine detailed geometric pattern work and he calls this sort of work Phil a cello and it actually stems from an Italian technique for a furnace style glassblowing where we call it reticello which is what this pattern is here looks sort of like a net and that's that's where the the Italian term comes from from the term net so to create this sort of crosshatch pattern work at a furnace you're creating two big blown forms that use stuff one into the other and if you have the the pattern going opposite directions on the two pieces when they come together you get this sort of cross-hatched effect so you Sheen is creating that effect through a different method by drawing lines of glass color on the surface of a tube so continue to walk this around here show you guys what we're shooting for so it's incredibly detailed and the the spacing and the geometry is really precise so it is a very time-consuming process to create work of this quality and and this this sort of accuracy so he as I mentioned he already put in about three hours on the section he's working on now and it starts as a cylindrical tube so it starts it as a cylindrical tube and he sort of maps out where each of these lines need to go and he understands that as he changes the shape of that cylindrical tube he knows where his different color details are gonna wind up in the the finished shape so that is what we're shooting for there are cameras in sort of see he's already established the outlines of where although those pattern bits are gonna go and now he's starting to fill in the the solid color fields in between the lines so we put a mic on you scene so you can talk with us a little bit maybe well I'm here yes hear me good yep awesome nice so you want to tell us a little bit of the background of how you started to develop work like this you seen in 2008 I I did this competition up in Vermont called the pipe classic and I was one of the competitors and Scott Deppe was also a competitor and he's well known for drawing these these detailed patterns as well so I got to watch him do this and previous to that I had tried to do this but not with very much luck because my technique wasn't right so getting to watch Scott Debbie do this technique changed how I did them all the way around and then I spent the next years after that just practicing and perfecting them and I guess I've been doing this technique now for about I guess 10 years I'm gonna draw this line of color here I can't talk while I do it too much I'm kind of like pressing the color into place after I after I put it on it's a very delicate process laying these lines they're very small the small stringers on this that I drew all morning are about maybe a half a millimeter in diameter or less small enough that you could fit them in a mechanical pencil if you wanted to which I actually know some some people that do that a guy that goes by punty he he draws a lot of like Mario themed work and he draws very very small stringers point four or something like that of a millimeter and he uses a mechanical pencil he loads them all in there and kind of has like five mechanical pencils with the stringers loaded in and then he draws with them he gets the ones with the metal tip so that it doesn't melt so what is what are some of the challenges that you're working around you've mentioned how you have to place the color very accurately what could I hate to bring this up but what could potentially go wrong and what are you doing to avoid that really I'm kind of drawing it's like drawing you know with a pen and paper but to be able to draw I actually have to draw in the flame so you have a third variable in your drawing process and finding where the heat is can be very very tricky you know I'm drawing out where you can't see the flame any more but it's still hot enough to melt the glass because these these stringers are so thin so the temperature sort of relates to the flow of your ink the the hotter get that glass the faster its flowing so he's got to sort of find this balance of Richer where he's got the glass flowing at just the right speed to be able to draw at the speed that he wants to drive I've got I've got basically hard ink yeah that won't flow unless I put it in the flame so do you draw much you know honestly I do not draw at all and I don't draw these patterns on paper before I do them I just started drawing on the glass I found it way more I don't know engaging for me I never really got into drawing on paper too much as the years have progressed I've started to draw designs a little bit on paper but not that not these patterns I don't draw these on paper but I draw like you know different blown forms I'll draw the shapes out beforehand just to kind of get you know the concept out and try and figure out exactly how I want to shape something but that's with Hollis shaping with this I don't draw these out I do all my experimenting on the glass if I draw one and I don't like it I throw it away which you don't want to do that but sometimes you do yeah if you're gonna make quality work as you're experimenting not all those experiments work out to your taste in your ear quality level you don't want to be putting out second quality work with your name attached to it so to get to a level of respect in the industry that you sheen has earned he does not put any work out there that isn't of the utmost quality and that that quality starts from the very beginning of the process even just creating these little stringers that he's drawing with the the colored glass he starts with are these rods of solid colored glass so he heat up the rod and if you pull it stretches and it gets thinner but a concern you can have when you're heating up a rod of glass is you can introduce air bubbles a lot of these colored glasses there are already some very fine air bubbles inside of the glass and as you heat the glass they will swell and expand and then as he pulls the stringer you could get a bunch of air bubbles trapped in that stringer and he would see results of that in the finished piece anywhere there's an air bubble you're gonna have a thinner layer of color it may even pop so you don't have any color coverage in a certain spot so even just pulling the the little threads that he's drawing with he had to be very precise in heating these rods and pushing any potential air bubbles out to the sides away from the material that he actually ends up using so he pray the the first hour or so today he was just pulling these little thin threads getting him just the right thicknesses that he needs making sure to avoid any any problem areas any of that bubbling and there's this piece I mentioned he's already put three hours into it and we've got him scheduled to work until 4:00 and that may be enough time to get this completely finished but to do this level of work typically our demonstrations here at the Museum we try to keep them between about 15 to maybe 25 minutes and typically we'll make you know a pretty full size standard vase or Bowl but with you seen here we have a unique opportunity to really see much more complex work and really see that the full scale of the process involves to make this level of work so if you find that your your your sort of overwhelming yourself with some of this I would suggest watching for awhile you get a good feel of what he's up to in this stage of the process maybe check out a few other galleries and come on back and see the the next steps as he progresses because it's an awful lot of detail and many very precise steps to pull off the the quality of work that he's shooting for here and if you guys do have any questions at all shout them out throw your hand up in the air we'll get your questions answered and I'll sort of continue to give you some glassy information and as you sheen gets to some points that he wants to point out to you guys he'll he'll speak up as well and we are live-streaming this work as well both on the museum's YouTube channel and also on torch talk YouTube channel we have a question from our livestream as to what torch oisin is using this is a herbert arnold 40 mill zenit burner and I prefer this torch for this technique just because I can I can go from a large heating flame like this or I can reheat down to a small flame very quickly on top of that I can also just the flame characteristics of this small flame are really good for drawing with stringers and it doesn't harm the torch some other torches can get damage done to them by running a small flame a walk like all the time so this torch holds up really well for the small flame so there even within flame working which is just one facet of the glass making industry there are a lot of different torches available on the market and they have different characteristics and you have to think about the style of work you want to make and you match up the right tool for the job that you need to do and here you Sheen's trying to draw very accurately with really thin pieces of glass he needs a torch that can put out a very fine needle to be able to control those those thin stringers the way he wants to and as he mentioned he likes having that that variability where he can go from this tiny super hot little needle flame out to a much bigger flame really quickly and do you find that the flame characteristics are particularly nice to colored glass also is that a benefit of this torch well just because of how this torch runs it runs a very low gas pressure so the the propane coming into this torch is somewhere between one I think it's less than one PSI actually but how they designed the torch is that it has a high volume but a low pressure so this this flame is really soft which is really good for pattern drawing and stuff with small stringers some of their torches run much higher propane pressures like GTT for instance runs I think at 10 psi which is 10 times more pressure and you really feel that when you're trying to draw your stringers because it'll start pushing stuff around and melting stuff in faster than you want to I want to keep these lines raised on the outside until I've gotten all of them on and then I melt them all in at the end which I'll probably be there and maybe in you know I'd say two hours from now I'm probably gonna be at a point where I'm gonna be melting in these stringers and then I'm gonna do the the flip process where I I terminate the end and then flip it open and then you can see the actual pattern I've been drawing this whole time because right now this is just all on the outside of the tube and you can kind of see it but the inside is that is the side that you end up viewing from the front so sometimes I kind of peek in into the inside from from the bottom here I can kind of look into the tube and see what's going on is that the seven hole centerfire yeah this is the the seven seven port center I prefer that to the single port but everyone's different Herbert Arnold does make a it's kind of like a Carlisle Center but smaller very similar though gotcha what mixture of gases are we running on we've got propane and oxygen propane and oxygen here is an air inlet here which I don't have it connected right now but the air is really nice for even making your flame a little cooler if you want to I don't usually run air while I'm drawing stringers but I know some people who do I've worked on one of these torches a little bit and I've definitely noticed they really soak the glass with heat as you sheen was mentioning there are some torches that have a lot of thrust of the gases and the tendency there is you heat one spot on the the tube you're turning the tube and you've got one spot that's a little hotter than the rest it's how hard to get a very even temperature all around the tube with this particular torch and the way it gently pushes that flame at the glass it seems to really soak the heat through the glass more uniformly and that's that's sort of been my experience with these this is just a nice gentle flame it's not forcing the glass around at all the the heat has a chance to really soak into the glass and as you work with the material this this intimately if every little factor every little bit of your tooling and your your colored glass or gas pressures your body position your hand positions everything matters more questions from the livestream what do we got do you ever do solid work on the Zenit or do you just prefer it definitely it's a great torch for making marbles and I've I actually spent quite a few years making marbles 2011 to 2013 I made mostly marbles more than any other object and this torch was what I was working on most of the time unless the marble got to a bigger size then it would go to the GTT torch just because it has a little more heat nice the internet is active today livestream is firing away and if you guys have any questions as well don't don't hesitate to fire away we will get them answered so well let oh we've got a question over here where you got gotcha so we have a question here you or as you're drawing and filling in with the color and going over you're sort of the the white lines and the dark lines there how do you manage to avoid trapping air bubbles as you sort of cross over those index lines that is a good question I usually melt in the lines just a little bit so that when I'm going over a previous line it's still raised a little bit but there's not an actual like crease there that could catch air so as I'm laying over that it won't catch air hopefully I still catch a little bit of bubbles every once in a while but I try not to yeah yeah I do make my living from glassblowing that is all I do literally all I do know the yellow is I believe just yellow canary I think from from Northstar and then this I think is goldenrod they're pretty close to the same but one's a little darker sure because of the reformulations with the with the alchemy ones they kind of thinned them out a little bit I prefer more opaque so right now Northstar is the way to go for me yeah do you change your flame chemistry dependent on the colors you're using or for a process like this so you're pretty much keeping to the the same flame chemistry I don't really when you pull the colors down to this small stringer size you don't really have to worry about flame characteristics very much anymore if there is a color that reacts to a small flame and even in the small stringer form I just don't use that color so what we're talking about with how the glass responds to flame chemistry well flame chemistry refers to the balance of oxygen to propane that he's got mixed in his flame certain glasses react differently to different mixtures of the gas and oxygen so a color like this yellow if he's using a thicker piece of it and using a flame that has too much oxygen or not enough oxygen in it it may start to boil and bubble and we run into issues where if we get a poor quality bit of color to try to draw this pattern work with and as Eugene was saying when you get things down to this scale where they're really thin stringers there's less opportunity for the glass to react differently with the mixture of gases in the flame and there are even colors in this palette that we can change the color dependent on the mixtures of gas and oxygen and the different temperature ranges we keep the glass at so there's a lot of factors in how we set a proper flame what is your favorite color combination or pattern hmm that is a good question I've done so many different patterns so many different color combinations lately I've been going for more of like the rainbow ones just because I like the full range of color well water is dripping from oh right on me yeah that just surprised me I think it was probably just like a warming up outside the snows melting all right we will keep our eyes peeled for another drop and if you get one more drop we're gonna move over there forward or something you're right on my piece well on my hand anyways let's pull you forward a little bit here I would say go that way a little bit yeah yeah then you want to make sure the hoses come with us it's not doing it anymore though it's just like once oh okay nevermind it did land it's right where my hand is too that's a little bit okay well can you slide with me and we'll watch the hoses where those hoses still slacked under you there in addition to being annoying to have whatever random water that were assuming it's water dripping on him aside from just the annoyance of its it could risk the peace so if the the glass is just the right temperature and it gets cooled really quickly by a drop of water it will crack so not only do we want you seen to be really comfortable we also want the glass to stay comfortable yep yep although I have dropped pieces right into the water bucket accidentally remember I was actually drawing one of these and I finished the whole drawing and I was doing the flipping process and I had a punty on the front and I was cutting some glass off with the shears over the water bucket and boom the whole thing went right into the water and it made this you know the sound that glass makes when it goes into a water bucket I reached in immediately and grabbed it out with my tweezers and there was only one other little piece that broken off of it I put it in the kiln put the little piece in the kiln and I brought him out and I actually married them back together well without any trace it was very lucky but that's just a I guess a short lesson on how to react when something like that goes wrong yeah a lot of times people would give up and just go well it's in the water bucket that's it and they just let it crumble the rest of the way instead I reacted really quickly and I took it out and put it in the kiln and I just fixed it but yeah it's amazing when things go wrong if you have the ability to think clearly when they first go wrong and sort of think about what the material needs what just happened to it how you can straighten out what it needs it's amazing what you can save that was definitely a lesson I've learned a long time ago watching a an artist Jim Novak working in the the hot shop and he had a huge female torso on the end of a blowpipe and was just about done working on this amazing piece and there pray $100 sudden the piece falls off the pipe hits the floor and the only person who wasn't freaking out out of a hundred and ten people was the artist he very calmly looked down at it looked at his assistant asked for a couple of things he grabbed a set of Kevlar gloves warmed him up picked him up his assistant was ready with another punty to reattach it and they managed to finish the piece it had some blemishes to it it wasn't a first quality piece after that but the key is to really just pause for a second and think clearly think about what the material needs and so it's amazing what you can save it's not what you can make it's what you can fix yep but I also feel like glassblowing in general is sort of like a process of constantly seeing what your your minor little flaws are your little mistakes as you're making it and you're correcting it's like every movement is a correction to make it better and I've always felt that way I don't know it's kind of how life is too okay so now I've got yellow and orange this is a really light orange but I do have yellow and orange on there and I'm gonna do red next so I'm kind of doing a fire fade on these X's that are going around the edge here kind of see it on the monitors and as you shiiin is mentioning what colors are on there they might look a little different right now when colored glass is hot it often looks a bit different than it will when it's completely cooled down and you'll notice that as he's working as well he might pick up a stringer that looks yellow when he picks it up but as he's working it's a really bright glowing orange and then as it cools it loses that glow from the heat but it still looks orange as it cools completely it comes all the way back to yellow so just different temperatures different colored glasses have a different appearance yeah the cadmium in this in these red yellows and oranges is actually what changes color while it's hot and it's kind of a good indicator for Boro in general just because when the color starts to go back to normal that means that's time for me to reheat and it's kind of a it's a great indicator because it keeps your piece from cracking if this gets too cold it will just it happens sometimes I'll have little cracks happen I can usually fix them and then continue working so another question off the the interwebs they're people wondering and with the flip process the the disk flip do you find it easier on thicker wall tubing or thinner wall it's much easier on thicker wall tubing this is heavy wall right here I have better luck drawing these pendant size patterns on on heavy wall but I think this is probably three millimeters in thickness that's pretty average for what I like to draw on for the smaller patterns but I stay with that three millimeter thickness all the way up to the larger size tubing like I've drawn on up to 40 millimeters and on 40 millimeter tubing it would still be three millimeters thick I think that would technically be call me diem wall so it's just a larger diameter tube but it looks thinner it's just just a larger diameter tube so when you first started doing these fill a cello patterns did you start on simpler patterns than what you've got going here or did you dive right into this level of complexity I definitely did simpler much much simpler when I first started I would kind of just do six lines diagonal and then six lines back the other the other way and create you know 16 it was just 16 lines really simple and I would fill each panel in with with one color I wouldn't be doing all this extra you know black and white you know Criss crossing and stuff so I mentioned the flip technique or disc flipped well ultimately you see you Sheen's drawing on a cylinder of glass so he's gonna take this shape and ultimately wind up with a disc shape and as he's drawing his pattern on the outside of the tube what ultimately becomes the face of the design is on the inside of the tube so he's got to take that cylinder shape and once he's got the pattern all set up he's gonna reform it and open the inside flip it open so then what becomes the face of the pendant is from the inside of the tube and by doing that he's protected his color pattern and also he gets a nice layer of clear over the tops of the color so it magnifies it it gives it a little more of a glossy glassy sort of look so many more steps to go once once the pattern is all laid on there and then as he's doing all that shaping of getting from a cylinder to the disc he's gonna make sure he's not shifting that whole pattern as he's changing the shape of the glass so there's a lot of very exacting steps involved to get to the the proper finished object that he's after and people often ask us is it easier to make something that's really big or make something that's really small well there's sort of a middle ground that's really the easiest and as you get smaller in detail it takes more precision as you get larger in scale it may take more people and more strength to deal with an object and this is at that level of small scale where you can see the sort of precision it takes in his hands we talked earlier about his breathing as he's laying down these lines he's always certain to inhale just before starting the line and exhaling through it to keep his hands nice and steady keep his body and rhythm with what he's doing and I've noticed there's a tendency when you're working very precisely and you're a little tense and and you know placing things really precisely you don't breathe in the same rhythm you sort of lock up a little bit maybe a pause your breath for a few seconds and that throws you off it throws off your body rhythm it throws off your your energy your not oxygenating your blood at the same rate and that may start to get your hands shaking you may get more fatigued more easily so at this this level of what's going on here even his breathing pattern is really an important aspect of making this sort of work so there's an awful lot to be considered here some watchmakers have to actually place certain certain things in between heartbeats I'm not to that degree so boy connect you to an EKG machine when you come back in a few years surgeons have things that help them steady their hands more too sure if we want to get much more detailed than what level glass is currently at we'll probably have to get some of that equipment here's one for you if you could dream up a new glass tool what would it be and what sort of work would it do for you wow that is a great question the tool makers are really doing a good job now of you know meeting our demands of what we need recently I've started doing a lot of faceting like cutting cold working on my pendants and some other parts of some of the pieces I make and this new fastener I got was made by ultra tech which is a gemstone company they make they make fasteners designed to cut gemstones but now they made a facet er designed to work with glass that's designed only for glass and they started a new company called glass tech to sell those new those new machines and I bought one of them and it had a whole bunch of things that made it a little bit easier to use for for a glass maker as opposed to someone working with gemstones so a lot of that is happening in tool world in glass and tools are it seems like a new tools getting made every day almost so so far so good but I mean like I said if we want to get much more detailed with these stringers we might have to develop some kind of something to make that happen whether it be wearing maybe some magnifying glasses or something like that that like surgeons wear when they're doing rike highly detailed work or I don't know maybe maybe a more precise flame something that's even sharper or something I don't know yeah it's hard to say we'll see where it goes but I know that the detail level I'm at now is I'm not even the top of the food chain as far as detail level goes there's other guys doing smaller stringers actually a young fellow in one of my classes who was doing any much knowledge ringers that he's here actually he's right here in the audience this guy yeah he goes by frumpy glass on frumpy on Instagram you guys want to see his his detail but he makes one of these patterns but eight millimeters in diameter so imagine the size stringer he said that his beard hair is thicker than the stringer that he uses that gives you an idea point zero six millimeters so I'm using point zero four I mean I'm using point five he's using point zero six so ten times smaller stringer to make these little teeny teeny little patterns you have to pretty much take out a magnifying glass to look at pretty fantastic hopefully we'll get to do a collaboration in the future yes yes yeah one of the pendants that he made he made a fill a cello pendant and then the Bale itself he made a little mini fill a cello that was a part of the Bale for the loop on the top and it was a I thought it was a Mille and then I looked closer and I was like oh my gosh you drew those that's your detail do you have we'll see if the camera can pick up both of them next to each other it's pretty crazy my eyes don't work well enough to even consider this kind of work let alone what my hands would do or not I bet yeah you're gonna need a magnifying glass it's insane let's see what the camera can pick up yeah it is literally the size of a million chip can we pick these up down here yet yeah maybe get in there see if you can get it I don't know maybe if I hold it up a little bit I mean we'll walk this around yeah I can't even hold it steady enough for the camera so we'll do another little lap around here and show you guys we got and hand-drawn with stringers I'll walk them around yeah so what's crazy is that pattern that little teeny 8 millimeter disc that he made takes the same amount of time maybe a little bit less than what I'm drawing right now so just because it's smaller doesn't mean it takes less time it takes maybe even takes more time because he's drawing less lines pretty crazy it's interesting even with using the same technique it's still a different body of work and a different voice that comes through on on these objects so if you want to see his work it's a it's frumpy on Instagram frumpy check that out it's really amazing stuff hopefully yeah oisin we've got requests for you to come back yeah yep you know your class sold out so I wouldn't need you to come back as well I'm sure I'll be back definitely I did hear there were 30 people on the waitlist I was flattered I was I mean that's awesome that's what I was thinking yep oh my god is the proper comment alright loosing little thin lines of glass on there right there pretty wild glass makers are really pushing the envelope of what we can do these days it is amazing correct so I think he draws his lines on six millimeter tubing so I'm using 19 millimeter tubing it's really he has to hand make it maybe you hand he buys six mil tubing and then he draws on that but it's quite impressive it is the kind of thing that you have to show someone I mean you can't really get a photo of it unless you did maybe a macro lens you could get you get some good photos it'd be curious to connect you with our photographers here at the Museum and see what they go through to try to shoot something like that would be interesting yeah and you did that one in the class right yeah that's awesome can even perform at that level in an away game huh not bad it's interesting you get used to your own studio your own comfort zone that you've set up and then you go to a place like this where we sort of stick you in the middle of a floor with some random table or go to our studio classroom which is fantastic but it's not set up the same way your home studio is and it's not always so easy to make that same quality of meal when you're in somebody else's kitchen and it's it's similar with with glass working it takes a little bit to adapt to your surroundings but the sign of true mastery is really being able to make the same quality of work no matter where you are whatever sort of tools people handle or hand you so I'm trying to decide what how I'm gonna color the rest of this pattern I just finished the red so I've got yellow orange and red and I did plan on using this lapis color it's like a lapis blue it's kind of between blue and purple it's a really nice color though so I was gonna do highlights of that I think that's all I had pulled but I might want to add some green in that would give it more of a rainbow look no no pressure on this question but what was your favorite thing about teaching in Corning all week just the the students they were very enthusiastic and stoked to be there and they put their really good energy all the way around and then also having Corning I mean having this you know the museum right here being able to go on these tours I got to go on a tour to this they make like dinnerware it was really amazing it was they make like plates and bowls and it's out of the special glass that they developed there and they gave us a bowl after after the tour as well it was just crazy to see this huge furnace they had this furnace that was if you can go on the tour I highly suggest it but I don't know how often they do it but yeah it was incredible this furnace was probably 20 feet across and it has this big thing that's putting material in at all times it's being dropped into the furnace and then glass is coming out the bottom and it's getting shaped into a ribbon and then the ribbons getting stamped into bowls and plates and then they're going along conveyors and then they come down to an inspection area people are looking at them it's incredible so that was that was a really cool tour among other tourism the Science Museum I got to go in there all that stuff and then yeah just all of the the talks and stuff there was a lot of great lectures that I did catch a couple of nice jain coax lecture was really good about it was like about glass chemistry and science that I learned so much in that just all of these ideas that I kind of thought about but I didn't know the science behind them and then hearing her talk about it was incredible yeah I've been I'm fortunate I work here I get to work with Jane all the time and I've learned a ton since she joined our staff super smart person for sure we have a chief scientist here at the Corning Museum of Glass who came from working for Corning incorporated for a number of years as a high-level scientist for the as well and as glass artists it's really important to understand the the material we work with as thoroughly as possible to get the best possible results out of it and even though it takes a lifetime of study in a very focused field of science to really become an expert on the material just getting some some little tidbits about why certain things are happening that we notice with the material and getting that true scientific background of what's really happening on the atomic level with the material will change your perspective and really change how you handle the material you start to understand how to use the material more effectively and glasses it's a really really intense material there's there's a lot to know about it it's almost like you're working with a living organism and you have to sort of form this relationship with the material as as you Xin is heating and pushing and pulling and placing material these sort of interacting with this changing material the whole time it changes dependent on temperature it changes with the amount of time you keep it at a certain temperature so you really you develop a very intimate feel with the material over the years and it makes a huge difference in your finished work how you how you build that relationship with the material and jeff's pieces if you're wondering we're not gonna bother answering that question we'll answer it for you tomorrow I think I decided on a I decided on a pattern or a way to lay the the rest of this out it's gonna take a little bit but it's it'll look really nice because now I have to fill each one of these little teeny diamonds in with with color and it's just tedious not quite as tedious as drawing the lines though drawing the lines is takes you know I guess I spent an hour pulling stringers in two hours drawing just the black and the white lines I'm kind of heating the glass up getting it up to temperature and then I'm pushing it into these little spaces you have to actually push it in there if you don't push it in enough it can trap air bubbles or you can have other problems mostly the air bubble problem so main one but there are certain objects and certain patterns where we might intentionally put some air bubbles in but for what Eugene's shooting for here that is really not what we're looking for we want that color to be nice and clean and noted no disturbances in the pattern it's like the meditation zone in here today seems like a good environment for this work yeah that hum of the furnace really does help actually I don't even need music this is and this is one of the quietest glass shops you will ever walk into and especially for the scale of it for our massive furnaces and the amount of ventilation we have going on here it's pretty comfortable and quiet so for those of you who are just now joining us welcome to the amphitheater hot shop and typically in a hot shop we are referring to equipment like the big furnaces that you see back here against the wall well today and tomorrow we have a bit of a special program going on we are very fortunate to have a very talented artist joining us this is Yu Xin Goines and he's visiting from Colorado he spent this past week teaching a class at our teaching facility across the parking lot the studio of the Corning Museum of Glass and we've got him for a couple of days in the amphitheater here to demonstrate his work and show us all the all the efforts that go into making the objects that he focuses on and he is working on a highly detailed dependent and he's been working on the same object since 9:00 this morning we were nice enough to give him a few minutes to eat some lunch and then he's been digging right back into the same piece again and making extremely detailed pattern work that really takes a full day of work to finish an object this size and we'll walk up there and I'll show you guys the the pattern that we're shooting for here and typically our demonstrations here at the museum we we tend to keep them to maybe 15 to 25 minutes or so but it's nice to take an opportunity to really show the full scope of what goes into a more complex object so we can show you with a little more accuracy how complex glass can be yeah and it's really not about scale larger objects could take more time but oftentimes smaller more detailed objects take a whole lot of time so it's nice to be able to really show you guys the full extent of what goes into making the highest level of glass work ah okay another another good question for you use alright how do you keep those temperamental cadmium colors from boiling as you're drawing with stringers well that is a good question it starts with the polling process I use a really soft flame really soft heat and I do a what's called a bubble free stringer technique which I did not explain when I was pulling stringers this morning but it basically consists of nipping a small piece of color off the end of a rod and then you punny up to it and you melt it from the punty side to the other end slowly and it melts the air out of out of the rod and then you pull that into a stringer and you end up with a small stringer but it's it's good enough size you know a nice stringer without air bubbles and so you know they are boilie even without air bubbles the the cadmium colors but if you take the air out it does make them a little bit more friendly to work with so I do that and then when I'm drawing the lines the the flame is so soft and small that it doesn't generally cause any bubbling but sometimes it does like sometimes I'll put you know a red crayon or yeah a cadmium color into the into the flame and I'll see it boil up a little bit I'll just go ahead and nip that off the end and start with a fresh tip to start over again if you use too hot of a flame they will boil so you do have to be really this super small super soft flame very gentle just want to get the glass hot enough to push into place you don't want to get it too hot so it's kind of hard to do with the small flame though honestly the small flame treats the cadmium colors really well so your your prevention of boiling starts from the very beginning of process exactly from pulling the stringer right through applying the stringer exactly so we had another question come in off the the interwebs somebody wondering what it would cost to set up a flameworking setup and I'll sort of dive into that one it really depends on the level of equipment you're looking for but setting up a flameworking studio is probably one of the least expensive ways to get set up and work with molten glass you can get a torch for as cheap as a little over a hundred bucks or you could spend a few thousand on a torch you would certainly need some regulators some gas lines you would want an annealing oven that's gonna cost you anywhere from maybe five hundred dollars to a few thousand depending on the size and precision you need from that oven so you really can get set up and get flame working for anywhere from about a thousand dollars to a few thousand dollars it's a pretty accessible form of working glass now to set up furnaces and things like what we've got going here people often look at the price tag on the front end when you buy a furnace it may cost you $25,000 $30,000 and that's just the beginning of the expense once you light that furnace you've got to keep it on and our furnace even though we're not even gonna pull any glass out of there for the next day or so we're gonna keep it on the whole time and keep that glass molten because if we cool it down we risk starting to crack some of the bricks of the furnace if they cool too quickly or if we need to heat it back up it takes a few days to warm the whole furnace back up properly so it's actually more efficient and safer for us just to leave the furnace on so once you get that furnace going it's a constant expense one of the benefits to the torch when you shut that torch off you're not not spending any money on gases anymore so there's another financial advantage there so question do the stringers melt at a lower temperature than the tube and all this glass has pretty much the same melting temperature but because the stringer is thinner it heats up faster than the tube it would take more BTUs to push heat through that whole tube and really get it soft and moving as opposed to the stringer being so thin the heat penetrates it faster but as far as melting temperatures they're about the same so for those of you who aren't aware we're live-streaming this on the web also so we've got questions coming in from Internet land and whatever questions you guys have don't hesitate to fire away well we'll get them all worked out and if you are looking for maybe a different style of demo typically in here we're doing a hot glass furnace glass blowing things like these bowls and vases that you see along the the front of the stage here we are still doing demos like these today in our innovation hot shop so right above the admissions Lobby if you are interested in seeing a 20-minute demo of a fairly standard bowler vase you can be sure to catch those up there we have demonstrations on flame working up in the Innovation Center as well we have a demonstration on fibre optics and how that technology works and also a demo on glass breaking where we sort of talk about how and why glass breaks the way it does and how we can affect that with with different scientific approaches on the glass so all sorts of stuff to see and do here how does you Sheen not go crazy when he's working on this level of detail all the time seems like that's your meditative space it's like a meditation I mean that's how you have to look at it mm-hmm I do have to be in the right mindset to do this kind of work sometimes I just don't feel like it I'll sit down to draw one of these and I just won't be in the right mind state I guess the more you do them the more you can get into that zone and and draw with small stringers but I find that it does take a couple of patterns before you're really in the zone the first one is always going to be rusty and you're gonna have some lines that go the wrong way next one gets a little bit better and a little bit better and so on so I think once you're in drawing mode you gotta you you you're gonna want to stay there or maybe not maybe you're gonna be like map this isn't a drawing day for me so I'm gonna go do I'm gonna make a cup instead or something like that sounds very much like meditation it's it's a practice and you you develop your mind around that practice and eventually you've practiced so much that you can get into that mental space fairly easily but yeah sure there are there are times that you can't get into that space once you're in the zone with this it's it just does itself you're just kind of going with the flow but yeah at first it can be I don't know that kind of goes with any kind of glass work though sometimes your your first pieces are rusty and kind of not quite in the zone the more you just stay on it the more you fall into the zone and you get into it and then your work starts coming out the way that you want it to come out rather than you know throwing pieces away cuz actually I have a lot of a lot of pieces that don't make the cut like I'll make it and then after it comes out of the annealer the next day I don't I don't want to sell it I just keep it or give it away to a close friend or something so another question off the web asking about torches and wondering if there's a sort of a starter level torch that would put out a flame profile that you like for this style of work a Carlile will work for this technique and that was what almost everyone in the studio was using but you could actually make your whole career using a Carlile torch for this technique and it would work just fine and that's much much lower price point than the herbert arnold this is probably a little over $3,000 for this torch for this 40 mm model you could get a carlisle for around 900 bucks i think so big difference definitely you could also you could go ahead and get a GTT phantom torch which it's a little harder on it to do the small flame with the GTT but it will hold up just you have to clean them every time you're done working if you're using the small flame a lot and then it'll be totally okay they build up a lot of carbon is that I yeah they do get that a little bit even I mean the the Arnold torch does get some some carbon that you have to scrape off the end of the torch and you'll actually notice that with the small flame on the GTT as well difference with the GTT is that the metal or faces on the face of the burner head are thinner metal so the metal heats up more rapidly and if you're using small flames it can actually start to glow a little bit and close the propane offices of your torch and that's easy to fix I mean you can send the torch back into GTT and they can clean it they'll do a shave off they'll just shave the whole face of the burner head off and then send it back and that's not that big of a deal but I think that you would probably get a few or even maybe five years of of small flame work before your torch would need that kind of work so that's another affordable option the GTT phantom is only nine hundred fifty dollars I believe it's a great torch really and it's very versatile as well you're gonna get flame sizes that you could work you know anything up to like 50 mil or even bigger tubing so yeah it's it's versatile and you can dial the flame in really well so it's another choice some good options on the market these days the flame working world has been really exploding in popularity and a whole lot of folks getting into this style of glass working over the last decade or so and it seems to be almost getting exponential how many people are diving into it so the markets for our tools have expanded enormously we have all sorts of different companies making new torches with different features to them we've got companies making new colored glasses that seem to be accelerating at an exponential pace we get new colors coming out on almost a monthly basis so the more we get artists to use all these materials the more that propels the ancillary markets of tools and color and and also collector bases as well thinking about what color I'm gonna lay next I'm not sure yet I'm gonna go back to this goldenrod here another question off of the web where do you get your glass I've been buying my glass from dnl art supply and denver lately they carry psy max that's what I've been using cymatics clear and they had a lot of different color odd I get a lot of my color from glass alchemy I'm on their gamma program I just once you buy a certain amount of color per year they add your points up and then put you on this gamma list basically I use a lot of colors so that's been nice to be on there I get color directly from North Star as well but when I just need like you know maybe a couple rods of color or something like that I'll go down to DL they have a lot of stuff I live in Denver's Denver area I live in Evergreen it's about 40 minutes west of Denver on the i-70 so it's about a 40 minute drive for me to get down there and get some color it's a nice option to have yeah nice to can pick your color because sometimes you'll order something and it'll come and it'll just be riddled with bubbles or something like that so I prefer to look through it so they're specific colors you will stay away from for this sort of pattern work colors that are you know that can crack on you some Boros stick colors are dangerous one of them in particular I used to use a lot is the what was it called any of the greens stay away from all Boros stick green just check cracks no matter what you do there's many other colors too I'll get to that in a second here so for those of you who have just been joining us over the last few minutes here this is the the amphitheater hot shop of the Corning Museum of Glass and welcome to it so typically in this space we do furnace style glassblowing you see all these big ovens that we've got back here and we typically do things like vases or bowls or some some larger scale sculptural pieces in here but we have a really special opportunity today and tomorrow we have a visiting artist this is Eugene Goines and he's come out here from Colorado to teach a class at our teaching facility across the parking lot and he's also sticking around for a couple extra days now that the class is finished to show some of his skills and his process for our audiences here so we have a really unique opportunity to see some very advanced glass making happening right here in the amphitheater there's another that's always a fun question what would you Sheen be doing for a living if he weren't making glass well that's pretty easy to answer before I got into glassblowing I did construction work mostly I was like I was basically just a worker guy that you know they'd say hey go pick up those two sheets of plywood and I would go get him or I'd be like up on the roof up high where other other guys you know the main guys didn't want to go up there and they they'd be having me do stuff up there I worked on roofs a lot they always said if you fall off the roof you're fired before he had you hit the ground one day actually fell off I jumped off though cuz I was gonna fall and I landed on my feet cuz I'm a skateboarder and did a little roll thing and I'm like I'm okay I didn't get hurt don't fire me but shortly after that uh yeah glass glass came came in as an idea I had a friend who he got into glass I went to high school with him and he moved to LA and then he moved back to Oregon and then that was why he moved back to organ was to try glassblowing his name is Mike Luna he lives in Southern Oregon he does like dragons and he's really good at sculpting and when we were younger in school he was really good at drawing and he did a lot of like graffiti style art which I kind of feel like I'm influenced by graffiti art quite a bit but yeah I got to watch him work for about a year off and on maybe like once a week for once at once every other week maybe and after watching him a few times I tried glassblowing one day and it just blew my mind of I was like why didn't I try this sooner he was trying to get me to try it I'd come into the studio a deal I'd be asking him all these questions and he'd be like go over there and just jump on that torch over there and try just melt some glass and I was like I don't want to I don't want to do it you know I didn't want to do it finally got on there it was like yeah I was just electric energy it was just like I got to do this and I just didn't stop just kept doing it I ended up quitting my job I was working at a smoke shop in Southern Oregon quit my job on that and then just spent all my time at the studio pretty much 15 to 18 to 20 hours a day even I mean I I lived in the studio I lived up above it in this little teeny studio apartment with five other five other artists didn't didn't care that I was living in the corner with a you know bag full of clothes and the pillow in a sleeping bag I just wanted to do glass so it's taken me a long way though that passions just continued as time has gone on and this technique now I'm like 10 years in on this technique in 18 years with glass so I started and I guess it was January 2000 kind of like blowing on each one after I draw the line because it cools a little bit faster and then I can wiggle and snap off the stringer see if we can translate this question for you what is he melt and whip off some colors and some colors he sticks and then Wiggles and breaks the stringer so like is there a difference in color the reason why I do that yeah there are there some that you snap as opposed to melt apart sometimes I do melt them apart when I'm filling an individual little teeny diamond space with one color I'll do I'll just dab the color in there and and pull out because I want to actually leave I want to leave enough color there if I were to wiggle snap after sticking one filling one little individual space it could pull too much color out as I wiggle and snap and pull away so I like to I like to just dab a little bit of color in those small spaces but it doesn't matter which color I'm using as far as the weather I wiggle snap or pull the color away it just has to do with the space that I'm putting it into smaller spaces I push it in there and then I leave a little bit at the tip after I after that little tip is there I take it and I push it down heat it and I push it down with the tungsten pick to kind of push that color into that space all right so okay let's see is it possible to use a gold fumed stringer for a fill a cello yes totally you can use gold fume stringers you can use any stringer you want I filled in with clear and then you just have the clear spaces in between all the regular lines and that looks actually really cool so with the gold fume you'd have a light you know just a really light gold depends on how heavy you fumed your rod before you pulled it into a stringer yeah you'd probably have two fume the rod and then coat it with clear trim really lightly and then pull that into a stringer and use that that's just a guess I don't know you'd have to experiment so we're throwing a lot of jargon at those of you who don't work with glass here so gold fuming if you take a piece of very pure gold 99.9% purity to 24 karat gold and put it in the right mixture of gases in the torch flame you will start to fume that it will start to off gas and you're actually spraying sort of gaseous fumes of gold at another piece of glass that you can have further back in the flame and you'll actually deposit some of that metal on the glass which will give you some different color effects and a stringer are these thin pieces of glass that you sheen is using to draw in the pattern so it's possible to color the glass by fuming it with gold pull it out into a thin piece and then draw this sort of pattern work in there so sorry for all the the flame working jargon for those of you who are not flame workers but how the how the questions are coming in here how much time is spent on cold work for each pendant I guess that depends on which pendant well it depends on the on the pendant and how big the pendant is and what kind of cut I want to do but on average I'd say I spend maybe two to three hours doing faceting and stuff like that on a on a cab and then I would heat it back up and then put the loop on mm-hmm so cold working refers to what it sounds like working the glass when it's cold when it's room temperature we can cut it carve it and grave on it and what you Sheen's referring to with faceting is sort of creating flat geometric sides like faceting a gemstone sort of an effect so we can do that with glass as well and what else do you have for questions here coming in so he's on oxygen and propane the propane is set at about 15 psi and the oxygen is about 30 psi is that yours I have a secondary I have a secondary regulator here that drops the pressure down to less than one psi so it's a I was saying sort of earlier but the pressure on this torch it's a low pressure but a high volume of gas so the hose feeding the torch is pretty large so it allows the gas to come in at a very low pressure but for there to still be sufficient gas to you know make a bigger flame like this if I wanted to are there certain colors that are not really cut out for small and detailed work yes there definitely are any color that could cause incompatibility like the borer Oh stick colors like I was talking about there's also some other colors out there that I just kind of steer clear of if they're known to cause any incompatibility like they could check later on like maybe like heavy blue leprechaun thing made by dropping Rome ium it's a great color but if you if you work it too much you'll wake up the next day and your piece will have little crack marks all through it I don't generally use that color in these back in the day I did a little bit until I had a couple of them crack and then kind of learned my lesson ah okay so for the beginners out there in the the glass world so something I didn't have access to when I started was the ability to take classes or you know there weren't really much there wasn't really much available as far as classes go and that made it kind of hard as a beginner glassblower I would have loved to take a class but I didn't get to so that's one thing I could recommend to a new glassblower would be get out there and take some of these really amazing classes that are being offered you know put in your application at Corning or at Pilchuck or at Penland or you know glass craft or wherever you want to go to take a class anywhere that you see one they're being taught at a lot of other smaller places I'm actually going to Rochester New York after this to teach another class at the studio called arc and flame and I think there's about ten students in that class just get out there and take take classes because the you know it's out there now when I started it wasn't there so that's what I would redo I'd be I would have been taking classes as much as I could you know yeah it seems like in this day and age there are a lot of folks who are taking advantage of opportunities to learn via social media opportunities or YouTube videos and you can learn a ton that way I've definitely been picking up a lot of new tricks off of YouTube videos lately but seems like you just can't beat being in person with your instructor you just can't see the same things through the lens of a camera or off of a monitor that you can really see in person there there's so many subtleties to glassmaking that to be there in person to make the mistakes with the instructor right there in the room with you to work you through those mistakes it just really can't beat that sort of a format the web has definitely opened up a lot of great possibilities and opportunities for sharing information but still that person-to-person sharing of information on a craft like this you simply can't beat that so who are some up-and-coming emerging artists that you're impressed with these days that's that's a great question there's a lot of really good talent coming out now a name that comes to mind right off the bat is this kid named avatar he's his real name is actually avatar he lives in Asheville North Carolina I think he's been on the torch maybe four or five years not very long at all but his his level of skill has just skyrocketed because of all the access to information like YouTube and stuff like that yeah so he's already at a level that took me 10 years to get out but he got there in like four years so that's how a lot of glassblowing is nowadays just people have more access to information it's easier to learn we actually have a really awesome artist here this is Tim he goes by ease he's out here in the audience stoked to have him here watching but uh yeah there's a lot of other really amazing artists that literally got good in like two years and I could probably go down a long list but I can't think of too many right off the bat I just named one we'll let you try to focus on what you're doing also oh yeah no worries can you use a plumber's torch to make small-scale stuff yes but you could probably answer this one go ahead one for you a plumber's torch it is possible but odds are it's not going to be the the right mix of gases that you're looking for a plumber's torch if you're talking about like map gas you can get some glasses hot enough with map gas soda-lime softer glasses you could work it over a torch like this it is hot enough to soften certain glasses but often times you're not getting enough oxygen mixed into the flame and you'll tend to discolor some of the glasses so it is possible to maybe start doing some rudimentary shaping of softer glasses over a plumber's torch but it's not going to give you the the quality of results you want over the long term so yeah yeah the the torches we typically flame work over run on either natural gas or propane mixed with oxygen and the the glass will react differently to different mixtures of those gases so for a certain level of quality of work it does require a certain quality of equipment as well to make sure you're putting out accurate enough flames for the the work you're doing so yeah you can try to melt glass on anything that will get hot enough to get it moving but to get the ultimate results that's right it's really helpful to have the the right melting technology and for the the glass that you Sheens using here this is borosilicate glass it has a relatively high melting temperature as opposed to many other glasses you really need oxygen mixed in with the the fuel to get that heat accelerated to the point where you can melt this this high of a melt temperature glass and every once in a while will even mix in hydrogen and oxygen if we need to melt an extremely high temperature glass something like a few silica or quartz they don't start melting until they're pretty close to 4000 Fahrenheit so mixing in hydrogen makes that possible just pull the string off the end of here we'll see if I I made it too hot so for those folks who were curious about you Sheen's stringer process if you you missed the first hour of him working here from about 9:00 to 10:00 this morning he was pulling the majority of his stringers and he does go through a very specific process for that to make sure he's not trapping any air bubbles in the glass that will affect the quality of the finished work later so when he goes to pull a stringer he doesn't just heat right off the very end of the rod but he heats a little ways into the end of the rod with the the idea being that he's melting a little further in and if there's any air trapped that molten glass is going to squeeze together and push the air out to the sides so the actual material that he's pulling the stringer from won't have any air in it any any potential air has been pushed out away from that glass that he's incorporating into his stringer if you're mixing hydrogen does the color of the flame change in any specific way it does it's actually not very bright when you work with hydrogen it can be tough to see the flame when but it's incredibly hot so when you work glass with hydrogen typically you're gonna wear glasses that have sort of a bifocal that are very heavily tinted on the bottom and not so tinted on the top you want the not so tinted area before the glass starts to get molten so you can actually see the flame but then you wear a 13 welding shield on the bottom as soon as that quartz glass does get molten it is extremely bright white and you really need to protect your eyes from it so hydrogen is a bit of a different sport so I have a question actually with quartz glass what are the ingredients of quartz glass what are the ingredients of quartz glass yeah quartz just pure quartz like your quartz just quartz is that it yeah quartz that has been it's gone through some filtering processes and then remelted into tubing or rod Wow yeah so it does go through a little purification what's the melting temperature of quartz above 4000 Fahrenheit Wow yeah so this is 2350 quartz is 4,000 yeah okay and quartz when you come out of the flame you have a split second to get it to move and then it just sort of locks right into place so that's it is pretty tricky to work with very I tried making a couple of things out of quartz just for fun just to melt it and actually a funny prank that people will do is they'll take and put a a tube of 12 millimeter tubing of quartz under station and you'll be like woah this won't melt and you'll like break your reamer and trying to open it up and stuff it's not a good prank don't do it or do but so there there are tens of thousands of different recipes for glass out there in the world and we change glass recipes for all sorts of different reasons we may change a glass or SP just to color the glass so to color glass we had different metal oxides and different elements from the Earth's crust in with the ingredients for clear glass so we can change its color sometimes we change ingredients in glass because we need different working properties from the glass and what I mean by working properties is really how long it stays soft for or how quickly it might stiffen up the glass that you Sheens using here borosilicate glass is what we call a hard glass it tends to not stay soft for very long so as he comes out of the flame he were to heat the entire tube he'd maybe have 20 seconds or so to do some shaping or as if he had a tube made of the glass that we have in the furnace here and got it to the same temperature same amount of mass he might have a minute to shape it so different processes you might want a glass that softer is stiffer particularly when it comes to machining glass so we use machines to make things like bottles or window glass and to get very precise movements from the glass while it's being machined we might engineer the glass very specifically for that specific process something like if you own a bottle factory you make more money by having your machine make more bottles per hour so you want a glass that as soon as that machine blows it into the mold it's gonna hold the shape of the mold and you can get it out of the mold and get more glass in there make more product faster so for a process like that we want a short glass one that doesn't stay soft for very long but when we do furnace style glassblowing where we're gathering glass from a furnace we want to get all the way to the bench and do some shaping we want a glass that stays softer for longer so we use a different recipe and wind up with a long glass for something like that and then another reason why we might change the ingredients in a glass as if we need the finish product to be able to perform a certain way that's another special thing about this glass here I mentioned its borosilicate there's a little bit of boron oxide added to this that you won't typically find in other glasses and that helps this glass not to expand and contract so much with heating and cooling and by not expanding and contracting so much it tolerates temperature change a lot better than other glasses most glasses if you heat them or cool them too quickly they tend to crack this stuff tolerates really quick changes in temperature so all sorts of different glasses out there in the world and all sorts of considerations as to why you might adjust formula alright so when you Sheen gets into the shaping of the disc it is is it gonna be a similar shaping to shaping a flower implosion or is it a different sort of thing I'm gonna suggest that is a different sort of thing I am gonna do a different technique than I did on this pendant that I have here is an example up front I'm going to make a bubble of colored glass and I'm gonna attach this pattern once I have it all finished and cut out and everything to the end of this bubble and work it in and I'm gonna create a thin disc that's squared on the edges and I'm gonna pop two holes in it so that you can actually use it as a pendant but it will just look like a disc so it won't have this bail at the top gotcha getting towards the end of this coloring process here filling all this in which is exciting pretty soon here we can start turning this into a cab to put into the pendant probably another 30 minutes I think I'll be ready to start shaping this any good general tips for flipping the disc there I will get to that when I when I get to that part definitely I'll explain the process I could explain how you can make it into a section that you would put into a pendant or one for maybe a hollow section I'm in actually be doing the technique to make this a hollow section because instead of backing it with color like I did on this pendant over here it'll it'll just it's basically just a different way of making a pendant but same idea more or less yeah yeah yeah hang in there Internet folks you're gonna see all these steps I'm getting there I'm close alright I'll take that one what type of glass would be better for a beginner to start on soft or burrow or if you have any commentary you can definitely chime in oh that yeah bean well I mean obviously it's a little less expensive to have your own studio at home with borer oh you can you could probably get completely set up for a few grand soft glass you can you can rent time at a lot of studios and there are beginner classes that you can take so you can get into soft glass as well and it doesn't cost too much you wouldn't even have to have any equipment so and the same goes with borer o2u I mean I'm sure you could take classes without owning any of your own equipment and you could rent the equipment to learn yes they both kind of lend well to it but I think that as far as having a home studio after you start learning this is gonna be a lot easier Bor oh it's gonna be a lot easier do you have any thoughts on strictly flameworking soft glass versus borer oh I haven't done it too much I've dabbled a little bit a lot of the stuff that you see is bead making so they're kind of using a bead mandrel and gathering a little bit of colored glass around it like coiling it on and then doing dot work on the top of the bead for that kind of thing it's it's a real low heat and you don't need a really hot torch so that that can be easier to get into it first uh actually an artist that I can think of right off the top of my head that started that way is a Yoshinori condo from Japan his works super detailed he does dot work he started with soft glass making soft glass beads I think that actually Tim is wearing one of them right now I saw him wearing it earlier it's badass if you want to look at it take a look arrow through my two cents on the answer also yeah Rose definitely a more forgiving glass but in my experience if you can learn how to work soft glass on the torch it sort of teaches you what glass wants and needs on a very specific material level and it can make working borrow even easier I could see that yeah so it is tough to start learning complex sculpture in soft glass it's easy enough to start learning it in sort of bead forms that's that's a reasonable way to get started but soft glass really reacts differently than borosilicate soboro tends to be more forgiving in most situations might be a little easier to learn certain types of objects on especially hollow forms or sculptural forms but there's some serious benefits to learning soft glass on the torch as well so I'd say just get started whatever you can get your hands on yeah I don't know what materials cost for soft glass for flame working but I imagine it's not too terribly expensive it's pretty cheap yeah yeah yeah that would be another consideration I generally recommend people start just with clear glass anyways no matter what you're beginning in but if you want to get started and get into some colors soda lime colored glasses are a lot cheaper than borosilicate glass if you're really curious just to experiment with color and glass then maybe the soft glass might be a less expensive route to go but as far as more forgiving for your shaping and getting sculpture off the ground borosilicate is definitely more forgiving there what maybe somebody in the audience knows this do you prefer what trap or a new trap [Laughter] book trap is there a way to harden the end result through something like say Gorilla Glass you could answer that well Gorilla Glass refers to a Corning incorporated product that is strengthened through a special chemical process of actually taking the glass and you dip it into a bath of molten potassium and what that causes is really a situation that's more referred to as tempering and you hear about tempered glass in your car your side windows and your your back window are always tempered so what happens is you create a compressive force on the surface so the surface of the glass is sort of pushing in and the interior is pulling so you've created a very tough outer surface but if you can break through that outer surface there is a lot of weakness that just wants to give way on the inside so we can create that by changing temperatures of the glass really quickly or we can create it by chemical effects borosilicate glass is not an ideal glass for that chemical process that chemical strengthening process I'm not even sure that it works with this glass there's probably some way to do it but if you're going to do that sort of strengthening process you're probably going to use what's known as alumina silicate not borosilicate so as far as hardening this more I'm not sure that you can do that with this glass especially with all the colors on there I don't know that there is a process that would really make it noticeably tough that's still gonna scratch with the same amount of force and well we'll only take on the same amount of physical pressure as well interesting question though what do we got is there an element they mix in the glass that determines the co e there are and I am not a chemist by any stretch you can adjust Co e with different ingredients so there there are many different ingredients that can adjust it up and down for those of you who are not familiar with our jargon here Co e refers to a coefficient of thermal expansion so as glass is heated it's sort of swelling on the atomic level and as it cools its contracting so for glasses to be compatible for them to work together and hold together in a finished object they need to be very close in that rate of expansion and contraction so the the glass that you Sheens using here this borosilicate glass tends to be around a coefficient of about 33 so anywhere really from about 32 to 34 is where you'll typically find artistic borosilicate glasses as opposed to the glass and our furnace here which is a 96 co e if we try to put those two glasses together they will stick together while they're hot but as they're cool they will peel apart and actually it's pretty cool you can do a test actually I knew that one of the one of the nice tests you can do with borrow of different kinds say you get a stick of borrow and you've like I've never seen this color I wonder what it does you can take it and you could you could attach it to clear you could have clear on one side and color on the other side and you could pull a ribbon basically with you know the clear on one side color on the other and then you let it cool it's perfectly straight when you pulled it but as it cools it'll either bow one way or the other and that will kind of tell you what the co e is if it's the same Co e it'll stay straight if it's not it'll bow it's a great little test to do though if you're like this is cracking everything I made lately and then you do that test and you find out it's totally totally off on CoA then there's your answer another nice trick if you have a kiln that you feel like isn't getting hot enough or for some reason doesn't seem like it's hot enough you can take a rod and turn on a really dirty flame like this and get carbon all over it put it in the kiln I'll carbon up and in about 15 minutes the carbon should burn off if your temperature is that if your kiln is that temperature it's not a temperature the carbon will just stay on there or you might see some like spotting where on the back part of the kiln that burned off but as you get farther towards the front the carbon still on the rod it's kind of another cool test to do kill them kill them testing you can like diagnose a kiln too because sometimes there's cold spots in your kiln you can go oh I want my piece to be hot and I want it to anneal correctly then you can put it in the right part of the kiln where it's where it's actually at temperature oh yeah yeah do you need some borer oh yeah I was just gonna pull a little Cana I can seat up this rod really quick and just get it molten barely even wants to stick on there it did stick though yeah are you gonna pull a stringer yeah oh cool we can see this trick you're in action could do it in the flame if you want try it with this yeah I got a rod here I could grab on to that that didn't even really get hot enough to stretch the Baro but I'll leave this on the table here and as it cools it'll just pop apart that map gas isn't really hot enough to even get boring but as these cool they they should separate a couple of seconds here should that'll be kind of cool and it pops apart huh it's gonna be like that's one you know your Boros really incompatible if it breaks apart after you've made a ribbon then you're like oh don't use that on anything surprised it hasn't popped yet but it is bound to every once in a while glass surprises you too in rare occasions I heard a rumor that there were there was someone who maybe it was a Luciola Baco who transitioned from soft glass to burrow by mixing oil and soft glass together in different ratios until he got he changed the ratio all the way to from from one to the other by making little bits and connecting them all I don't know if that's true I haven't seen him do that all the way to borrow okay sure but definitely between different soda-lime glasses I've seen him do that we call it a grated seal it's something that's done in the the scientific glassblowing industry also and you have to join different materials the the general rule of thumb is on that scale of coefficient of expansions you can really only connect glasses that are within about three points typically there are some anomalies to that as well so essentially you're mixing glasses with different cos and different percentages to fill that gap so the glasses Lucia would typically work with would be 104 to 90 or 96 somewhere in that range so if you make a few percentage steps you could fill that range in what may be four graded seals something like that but to go all the way from 104 to 33 to bond it with bore oh it might be impossible okay my rumour was wrong yeah it's probably possible but man you'd you'd have to go through great pains and that's a lot of transitions I would say so yes maybe that's a challenge huh that's good I don't know if I want to do it but I'll be here all night mixing glasses yeah and there are there are some ways around coefficients of expansion being within that three-point range - there's different viscosities of glasses even within those different coefficients of expansion and if you can get a balance of how it's moving due to temperature versus its viscosity at certain temperatures you can get very varied glasses to work together but probably not something you want to experiment with in your your a quality artwork uh-huh yeah we got that question a few minutes ago on the web - so you wanna snapping the rod apart sometimes I'm scrapping it and sometimes I'm letting you know the really small spaces the ones that are like they're probably only one millimeter in diameter that I'm putting color into I'm I'm pulling away and leaving a little blob of color on the end then I heat that blob of color up and I push it down with the tungsten just because I want enough color in that little space if I wiggle snap-on in such a small space every once in a while it won't stick and it'll just take a big chunk of color with it so that's part of the reason why I do that on the bigger spaces I can get away with wiggle snap because I have more movement the glasses moving in a direction so it's just examining our little combination of soda lime and borosilicate and it did crack it popped off of the the mass that I pulled out there and on the the soda lime side the glass is really webbed out and cracked like crazy borosilicate side didn't I don't think it cracked at all it looks like it's perfectly clean through there and my my theory on that is that the soda lime glass is a much broader coefficient of thermal expansion it's trying to move a whole lot more than the borosilicate so it's gonna put itself under more strain and it's gonna break into more pieces there's there's more energy trying to pull alright I filled this thing in all the way but I still have to do what I like to do anyways is a gradient of different colors all these colors that I've used I'm gonna kind of do rings of them on the backside here and it just gives a really nice look on the outer edge of the pendant kind of frame in the look a bit yeah yeah exactly so I'm kind of melting this in a little bit it's now all the colors on twisting both directions on the marver pad here so I don't want to twist up any of my work that I've spent four or five hours doing if you aren't careful can that design start to smear 100% and I've had that happen so many times it usually happens when I use too hot of a flame and I heat up the base lines the black and white lines I have underneath here if I heat those up I will totally totally smear them as I'm laying the color on top so I have to be careful less heat everybody's curious about whether or not you have a coffee habit I like coffee I don't drink a whole lot because I love the flavor of coffee but if I have more than one cup it affects how I draw the lines sure yeah and honestly one cup is pushing it a lot of times I drink like I like European sized coffees I can drink that sized coffee yeah it's like a little teeny one you know when I was in Barcelona I was drinking the Cafe con Leche x' it's like milk with coffee in the morning that's what they call that and then you have in the afternoon you have what's called the Cortado and it's like a small coffee and it's it's a know what is it the first ones milk with coffee and then it's coffee with milk you switch it around and then in the evening you just have espresso which is you know just pure sounds good yeah it's nice and I never felt shaky from that or anything the doses of coffee they give you over there much smaller and you know I didn't get and now if I go get a Starbucks in the morning and get like a large size I'm gonna be unable to draw almost yeah yeah I know I heard one of the old engravers for Steuben glass years ago talking about how he gave up coffee and gave up alcohol to steady his hands for that level of Engraving sometimes you have to make some commitments to the work for a certain level of work you got to keep your body in a certain condition I have found that when I drink less alcohol I can draw the lines cleaner as well honestly one who represent sober is how I prefer to do this kind of work yeah I do my best work when I'm not affected by anything alright so for those of you just coming in welcome to the library at the Corning Museum of Glass this is our hot shop amphitheater but we've got deep concentration going on in here typically in the amphitheater hot shop we do so fairly large-scale glassblowing projects things like vases and bowls and goblets and a lot of the the objects that you typically think of for blown glass but we have a really special opportunity both today and tomorrow we have a visiting artist now this is Eugene Goines who is visiting from Colorado and he was here this whole past week teaching a class on some techniques that he is a renowned master of at our teaching facility across the parking lot here the studio of the Corning Museum of Glass and that we are lucky enough that he is willing to stick around for a couple of extra days and really show how he makes his work now typically demonstrations here at the Corning Museum of Glass we keep most of them between about 15 and 25 minutes or so and that allows us to make pretty decent objects that really represent the the glassblowing process pretty well but to make more advanced objects it takes a lot more time and machine is spending the entire day working on a very detailed pendant form and walk around and show you guys the sort of patterning we're going for here I don't know she ladies have seen what we're shooting for here I'll hang onto that for you but super detailed geometric pattern work going on there so he's been working on the the pattern itself on the outside of a piece of cylindrical tubing it's just about done doing the patterning and now it'll be time to change the shape into a pendant form so getting through some of the steps here and to make this level of work with this level of detail takes all day anybody else up top who hasn't seen this yet you guys get my exercise again yeah so super finely detailed geometric pattern this this is what he's making and where you see him decorating on the outside of the tube that is actually the backside of the pendant so as he finishes laying the color he's gonna change the shape of that and open it up so we see the pattern revealed from the inside pretty crazy right and he's gonna do all that shaping without destroying the pattern also yeah he sure did pretty amazing work and you're not often gonna see somebody demonstrating this level of work in public so that's a pretty pretty good opportunity here not bad right how long has you Sheen been working glass and how did he get started earlier but I could say it again I guess I started in the year 2000 in Southern Oregon and I originally had a job working at a smoke shop where I actually had access to see some like detailed pipes and I sort of got to know glass through pipes just looking at these pipes and then one of my friends started blowing glass my friend Mike Luna that I went to high school with that would over the course of about a year watch him once a week maybe twice twice a week maybe less than that maybe only like once a month but I would go watch him and he would always say hey you should try it and I didn't want to try it I just wanted to watch and kind of learn about it so that I could tell customers in the store more about the techniques that went into the pieces they were buying and then one day I tried it and that was kind of just it I ended up moving into the studio living in this little studio apartment above the studio working everyday for even up to 20 hours just cuz I was so stoked on glass and that's just kept going and Here I am now ya had a lot of help along the way a lot of other artists helps me yeah and you've lived in parts of the country where you've been around good glass communities as well and sort of been around a community of folks who have really helped to build the flameworking seen over the last couple of decades yeah definitely good community B to be a part of the studio where I work now in Evergreen Colorado I share with five other artists w JC glass nate Meyers Adam G Joe Peters and elbow those are my those guys are my shop mates and they're they're huge inspiration to me all for different reasons they're just mega talented they're you know leaders in the field of what we do and it's interesting so many artistic movements through the course of history you see communities of artists who really come together to move an artistic movement forward and we're seeing it in the flameworking world these days as well it seems like some of the folks who are accelerating the fastest are deep within those communities of glass workers who are sharing information and sharing results and techniques we all accelerate a lot faster by sharing information all right I got a couple more lines to do and then I'm gonna actually start the process of flipping this probably gonna get it done right at four just like you were planning yeah hopefully so right now on the inside this doesn't really look like much because it's just all this color pushed to the outside it's almost kind of like reverse painting the stuff that I want to see in the foreground I put on first and then all the other stuff that's farther in the background I put on after that there we go I got all the color on finally whoo Gulf clap for getting all the color around there there we go yeah [Laughter] that only took five hours detail takes time in glass working we get that question all the time what takes the longest to make well the more detail you put into an object the longer it takes whether it's color pattern or sculptural detail building up mass can happen fairly quickly but it's really the details that you gotta you gotta spend lots of time on and to get high-quality details takes even more patience and more more attention to every level of your process and machine right from the very beginning of this process just pulling those little threads of glass that he does for all his color work there is very precise and even how he just prepares those they they work well for him as he's applying them they work properly all the way through the the melting and shaping every step of the process matters to come out with a high-quality object so right now I'm uh I'm thickening the end of this this tube there's a little bit of extra clear on the end and I'm kind of just gathering it up I'm thickening it up I'm gonna do the termination and actually a term I came up with in this class that I just taught across the way here was a I do this thing where I I gather up a bunch of glass on the end and it creates this kind of like sharp Maria I was calling it a determination of oleo because it kind of looks like in a Volvo and then that creates this thick glass close to where the color ends and then when I go to pull this I don't disturb or pull too much color from one side or other another side of the color on the end it pulls all evenly and then when my terminations pulled out even it's not a crooked or something like that and by termination you're talking about the center of the pattern where it comes yeah yeah exactly there's a little piece of soft glass on the tip of this rod I put it in the flame it way please so this is where I'm gonna gather this up a little bit kind of heat it up turn up my flame a little bit been using a much softer flame this whole this whole time so just increasing the heat a little bit I kind of get a nice bit of glass that I've added onto the end of here and once I get it melt it down close to the color I'm gonna push it on my marver pad to create a sharp Maria there we go some thicker glass there on the end it looks like the opposite of what you would want to do to do the termination is that add more glass to the end but sometimes you have to add it so you can take it away just making sure that it's as straight as I can make it you know actually as this cools I'm going to hurt hold these handles out towards the ends more so that the airs of my hands rotating or not amplified or they are amplified so I can see the imperfections so now I'm just gonna let this set up I'm gonna keep it warm back here a little bit because it's starting to get cold back there looks like I caught one little air bubble I'm not gonna fret too much about it sometimes I can pop them though the special air bubble popping technique we'll get to that later okay so now I've got a nice small sharp hot flame I'm gonna heat this up right at the end right where the color ends on the tip here right where right next to the the Maria that I pushed together there that Maria kind of doesn't get hot as quickly as the tubing gets hot where the color is so it serves as a stopping point where the the when I pull this apart the color will stay at that last stopping point against the volio or the the Maria and then I pull away and it pulls evenly slowly heating it and waiting till it gets the right temperature then I slowly start pulling apart and really slow at first and I'm not twisting at all both hands are spinning at the same speed as much as I can and starting to come out here you got a nice even pole here I'm pretty happy with it I'm gonna take this out of the flame and just continue pulling this down keeping my hands spinning same speed keeping this straight I'm gonna keep that just like that for now it's pulled out it's not pulled all the way off and then I'm gonna go and melt the back part here the reason I don't pull this all the way off is because I'd have to immediately punty right back up to it so rather than punting back up to the freshly pulled off end I'm just gonna go and keep that there keep it sort of connected it's kind of like a point now I'm heating up right behind the color rings that I did I'm gonna give it a little puff it's kind of starting the back bubble this is the bubble that I'm gonna actually turn this into a I'll flip this design around the other way basically so you need that full amount of clear there to be able to form the shapes you need to get this flipped open yeah I need a little extra clear in the back that's why I left that there so that I can actually flatten this pattern out and you'll see as that happens right now it's like how is he gonna do that but you'll see just keep gathering this up adding heating up adding a little bit more of this clear tubing into the bubble of clear that I have going and puffing it out and I'm gonna gather up all this 19 mil I have get a little bit bigger of a flame here and kind of gather this up a little bit more sometimes I don't have enough clear on the back side and I have to add a little more just never fun to do but you got to do it sometimes I think I have enough here my rule is is if you draw on 1/3 of the tube then the other 2/3 should be clear so that you can flatten the design out afterwards trying to make this clear bubble as even as possible because I want this this pattern to spin out evenly or to flip evenly basically how these patterns work is anything that you do to them in the beginning reverberates out to the pattern in the end if you have something that's one millimeter off in the beginning of drawing it that one millimeter could translate to quite a bit in the end that's why I use calipers like earlier this morning when I was drawing this I was using calipers to make little Mark's and dots on the tube to draw the lines so I could I could have it be as precise as possible trying to create an even heat base that's why I pulled out the front of the flame okay that's gonna be good I'm gonna finish the termination in a second here I just got to make a smaller soft flame the color is really sensitive at the end of where I'm gonna terminate this so I have to be really careful I have to use a really small soft flame to pull this off if I use too hot of a flame I'll boil the color on the end so I'm pulling this out and rotating my hands at the same speed and at the very end they're kind of twisting back and forth as I pull the rest off and I'm gonna pull out here in this soft flame just do a couple more times of pulling the color off I stop rotating when I pull because I want this I don't want there to be a twisted rotation in the middle of my termination I wanted to come perfectly to a point just like all right I think that that could be good enough just trying to take a look at it and see if there's any twists going on anything like that I'm gonna melt it a little bit and see how it feels seems pretty good I think I'm gonna do a couple more polls off the end of this it's a question of what you mean by soft when you're referring to your soft flame not pushing very hard so I probably am not even at a what would be called a neutral flame I'm probably on a more oxidizing flame so less propane less oxygen probably a but as far as ratios go a little more on the propane side than the oxygen side and you're really concerned with the thrust of the gases yeah out of the the phone yeah big-time if you if you have gases pushing out too hard it can that's what causes the boiling yeah like if I were to use a flame like like this or something it would just boil the color immediately right now so I have to be really careful I have to turn everything down really soft soft heat and I can notice a difference in your candles in the flame also yeah the candle gets bigger on the Arnold torch I can actually help that by turning this on this is a flame optimizer it's a little knob gets rid of the brake handles a little mm-hmm and I'm also not aiming the flame right at the the very tip of where I terminated this I'm kind of just a tad back from the end and I'm like melting it a little bit puffing it a little bit letting heat sort of radiate from the thicker spots out to that point yeah I'm trying to even out the thickness too because it got really thin on the end from doing the termination and there's a couple of air bubbles one of which I see that I might be able to get rid of did you hear that sound that was me actually pushing an air bubble with the tungsten pick cold and it broke it broke through with the tungsten pick and then I can actually go back with a small flame and close it up it's a different style of cold working then you typically see it really makes a difference I mean because you you just completely get rid of that air bubble I see another one but I don't know if I'm gonna be able to get it it'd be nice to get it but it hasn't worked itself to the surface if I melt this a little more it might come to the surface a bit more sort of impossible to avoid air bubbles so I try to pop the ones I can and get rid of them the ones that I can't get it's a makers mark I found another one sometimes the mini George can help them come to the surface you got to be careful though because it's it can boil the color so I'm kind of doing this waving pattern I just kind of pushed this one to the surface and I broke it those were like the two biggest ones so any other little ones I'm not going to worry too much about all right pop the air bubbles that I can pop basically another golfclap from up top there yes yes so back to turning this into a disc I'm gonna flip this whole thing now still using a nice soft flame I'm not trying to overheat the color I'm always spinning one direction then spinning the other direction so I don't twist my pattern if you twist one of these up it's like the worst feeling you just I just spent five hours and twisted everything up I can untwist them that's the good thing yeah yeah definitely like if I see that I twisted it at this point I'll uh I'll lightly connect up hunty to the end and then heat it very gently and twist it back very rare that I twist them nowadays but maybe if I got distracted it could happen no no no should be able to do that although I do have this one last air bubble that I really want to get rid of so for those of you who have just joined us in the last few minutes here welcome to the amphitheater hot shop now typically what we do in this space is we do furnace style glassblowing we use these big ovens that you see behind us here and make things like bowls and vases some of the objects you see on at the front of the the far side of the stage there but we also like to use this space to host artists from out there in the world who may not live here in Corning but may be renowned artists and give them an opportunity to show us how they how they make their work and so we are very fortunate today and tomorrow to have you Xin Goines joining us from Colorado and he has been here this whole past week he was teaching a class at our teaching facility across the parking lot the studio and now we've got him here today and tomorrow to make some of his work for our public audiences to see and so he's using a process known as flame working and for flame working as you can see we use a very focused heat source typically a torch and yachine has been working on what is going to be a pendant all day he started at nine o'clock this morning he's been working on the same object the whole time making a very fine geometric pattern for what ultimately will be a pendant so he's applied all the color and now he's starting to change the shape and he wants to change the shape of the form without changing the pattern and without that shifting around so they'll be a phase of multiple stages of heating and Flay ting a little bit and really slowly adjusting that shape making sure that the pattern doesn't shift at all and I'll take a quick lap through the the bleachers here for those of you who haven't seen the finished object that he's shooting for we'll show you how this pattern works so I'm slowly right now melting this and turning it into a flat pattern rather than a cylindrical pattern like it was while I was drawing it and I just go really slow I melt it a little bit I puff out a little bit melted a little puff out a little bit until I get this flat this is about to become flat here this is the best part because we get to have have a little glimpse of the pattern I've been drawing all day the first time we'll see if it came out good god I'm gonna put it in that water bucket no I'm kidding yeah I don't ever put my stuff in the water bucket unless it's just completely toast always spinning both directions to keep from twisting my pattern so now I'm going to dip this pattern into the tube a little bit I'm focusing the heat on the center it's gonna go in just a little bit holding the tube downwards so gravity makes it fall in just a little bit and then I'm gonna do the teeniest suck inward that kind of dips it in a little farther we get a lot of guests here at the Museum who are under this impression that if you inhale as a glassblower there's been sort of this long-standing myth that you would burn up your lungs as well not true all that hot air doesn't come all the way back through and sometimes we intentionally have to inhale to change a shape a specific way all right so next I'm going to use this punty here that I had earlier it'll set that off to the side and keep this warm because they're very susceptible to cracking in this form we're gonna see how this pattern looks I think it came out pretty even and I'm basically gonna pop a hole off the side here oh I don't have any shears just realize that there's probably some over there huh small ones these might work I don't need them to be too good but if you do have a smaller that would be good we've got shears and every size imaginable here we go found some no no shortage of tools around here perfect who are these Carlos oh these are the best carla donas are my favorite unfortunately left mine in Barcelona but I'm going to pick them up they cut through glass like butter just like I heard that they're gonna be the last few sets of them at gas conference that uh they're stopping making them it's just a rumor though I don't know if that's true wow I hadn't heard that yet but I know I've spoken or the Roberto and it is not easy keeping a business afloat over on Murano so they are the finest shears out there I mean when you cut with these it's just like wow really really nice people tend to be surprised when they see us just cutting through glass like it's a piece of paper but it's all about temperature you get the glass the right temperature it's soft enough that you can just snip right through there there we go the first glimpse of the pattern [Applause] actually this one came out great really really happy with it usually in demo situations stuff doesn't come out as good but this is not the case with this one this one's probably one of my better ones in a while so all the questions didn't throw you off to keep it warm though so the reason I cut it and then flopped it open like that because because I don't want a punty to the backside the reason I don't plenty to the backside where the color is is because a lot of times you'll go to do that and when you pull the punty off it'll take some color with it and it can take the whole center of your design out which would look really bad so especially after you spend five hours drawing it so I'm going to heat this up in the center get my punty hot I'm going to attach this as close as I can to the center so I've been spending the whole week drawing these patterns and I feel like I'm really warmed up now it almost does take a whole week of drawing these to where you really get the results that you want okay so now I got to get this excess clear off and lucky for me I have these fantastic Carlo Dona sheers here to cut it off with because normally since I left my car Lowe's and Barcelona when I was visiting there in October I haven't had them but I'm going back there and in March so I'm hopefully gonna pick up my tools had an unfortunate accident where a friend of mine was taking my stuff to the air B&B it was really late at night and I'd actually just broke my hand skateboarding I couldn't carry my big box of tools so he's like I'm gonna take this to the air B&B for you and he took it unfortunately the cab driver was kind of rude and drove off before he could even get it out of the back the whole case got drove off with about a month later my friend Augustina helped me put in a missing bag report at the Barcelona lost and found which they actually have that it's pretty crazy but a month later they called her and said we found the box it was a big pelican with stickers all over so it was unmistakable luckily for me they found it all and all my tools are there I'm gonna go back there in March and pick them up along with my Carlos I really missed these got an extra set give you 500 bucks we have a different definition for actually I was using Jim Moore's knate knate had some Jim Morris he was my ta in the class and Nate Meyers and they worked really well I'd say they're very close second very very close but these are still my favorite if you worked with cutting edge shears at all yeah like how they cut yeah not as much I like these it's something about the thin blades how small and thin and dainty they are but still so sharp and they don't dull the metal I think is it must be folded or it's really hard steel alright so been taking a long time to do this but I'm gonna heat up the outer edge glass just got to get it a little hotter of a flame and the goal here is gonna be to get all this glass hot and cut it all in like one go if I can that's what I prefer to do cut it all off in one go with these might be able to do it using a little bit of centrifugal force there and now I'm going to go in and cut this I'm cutting close to the color but I'm not getting too close try not to heat the color very much couldn't get all the way around just a little bit too much glass there I just wanted to put this in the garbage there all right so I got got that cut off pretty good now I got to clean up the edges so got the pattern here cut off pretty well pretty happy with this pattern honestly uh it's a fire lapis color combo fire lapis and white it's got red yellow orange and the lapis really with the white it's just one of my favorite combos I love I love the contrast of those two so now I'm gonna go in with the six mill rod I'm just gonna peel off the outside layer very carefully it's really easy to take too much when you do this so you have to be really light a lot of times nowadays I I'll cool this off and then take it into the cold shop and grind off all the clear on the lap wheel it's a much better way to do this it's a little cleaner but for the sake of this demo I'm going to do it the hard way so we can get it done otherwise we'd have to sit here and wait for this to cool and then take it in there so some folks might be wondering why you're willing to use shears and do that sort of cutting and now you don't want to use shears for this last little bit of clear coming off of here I have a sense as to why that would be you want to explain that to the crowd you're now sort of peeling glass off rather than cutting oh yeah because the shears it's just a little harder for me to get like the size of these blades it's hard for me to get in there and get that clear off without distorting the color because to get this clear hot enough to cut I would have to heat into the color a little bit and then I could distort my color and distort all the pattern work that I spent hours drawing so I'm just gonna slowly peel away at it it'll take a little bit but not nearly as long as the drawing process I keep this 8 mil punny on here if I were gonna take this to the cold shop and I would make sure it's sealed on really well like a hard seal and then I would go on the lap wheel like this and just grind it and I'd be rotating it on the lap wheel as I'm grinding yep so it's real close here just got to go around one more time peel off a little bit more clear gets really sensitive here because you can you can peel too much and peel into the color I'm gonna leave the tea Gnaeus trim of clear around the edge of this just a little rim of clear around the edge get it remember to reheat the whole cab in between pulling glass off the outside or it'll just crack right in half which is really a bummer it's happened to me quite a few times and yeah we don't want that hasn't happened in a while though so I'm looking for a nice even rim of clear around the edge it's real close probably just going to pull a couple little more bits off of here all right I think that's good for pulling clear off so we took it from where it was I'll show a little shot of it on screen here so you can see a little better yeah here we have it I'm blocking it there we go and I still have to make a hollow vessel to put this into so that's gonna be the next step it doesn't take too long I want to say maybe another 30 minutes as long as it's okay for everyone to hang out and play want to absolutely yeah cool yeah yeah I haven't even looked at the clock I'm thrilled here then the story come on right now I've had it yeah another 30 minutes and it'll be a finished pendant perfect this is a little different process than I did on this other pendant that I have here that uh Eric was passing around or showing everyone on that on that pendant there I just once I had it flat on the back of the tube I would coil I would pull down some color down to about four millimeters and then start from the center and coil a layer of color all the way around till he covered the whole back and then I would take that and put a bail on it remove it from the tube and then clean up the edges cut the extra clear off just like I just did and then I would put a bail on it usually I use the marble mold to even the edges might actually do that on this one so to do that I kind of heat up nice even rotation even spin in the marble mold that evens out the color on the edges marble molds are great for that so now it's even a little more round looks like a pretty even layer of the lapis color around the edge minimal air bubbles maybe a couple a couple maker's marks in there so now I'm going to take this and actually the punty isn't quite on here good enough so first thing I'm going to do is make sure this punty is melted in last thing I want is for this to pop off at any point so punty is on there really good now this is on here good enough that I could cool this off take it over to the lap wheel and grind off the excess clear if I wanted to but uh another reason for that is sometimes when you break the pony off or if say if I bonk this against something and it popped off with the punty the way it was it would probably break a chunk out and take some color with it which would ruin my design so I'm just trying to keep this design as intact as possible as close to how it was when I drew it that's good one don't trip on that and he tripped over the electrical cord and broke everything I didn't think about this but I should have heated this up although I'm kind of thinking I'm not gonna use this because I want to go with the color that's more pure so this is a VAX tack color I think I'm gonna go with this color called Bros a it's a really nice mix it's like between rose and brown it's it's really a nice color it's made by glass alchemy it's I think they added it to their permanent palette so it's pretty available now really bubble-free really good optics to it I'm just gonna coil up about maybe not even a whole stick like maybe half to three-quarters of a stick for this Thanks so I'm gonna try to inspect the stick to see if it's clean make sure it doesn't have any rocks in it or anything like that and I'm gonna do the old wipe off on the shirt technique clean it up a little bit it's pretty clean anyhow I have it right in the in the package here so didn't get dirty pull off the end here there's something really gratifying about coiling up some color it happens a lot faster than the technique I was just doing too much much faster so I open this tube of 12 mil up a little bit I'm just calling this up I'm kind of rotating the glass a little bit in my right hand and I started around the edge of the tube and I'm slowly just coiling this up making it bigger as I go so you're trying to create a tube of the color that you currently have a rod of yes yes exactly this is probably one of the easier techniques to turn rod into tube there's a lot of different ways you can do it a lot of different ways so this is the first time you've done this technique yep definitely does not usually go quite so smoothly or neatly for folks with less experience yeah I've done a lot of coil pots in a way it's kind of like pottery maybe I think that this is a technique in pottery with a coil up clay and then make a vessel yep I'll answer this question from the internet for you okay why not just use colored tube was the question he didn't have this color in tubing form so he hid his own tubing so that's exactly what's happening I was gonna use some of this other color I have that was vac stacked it's called voodoo but I think for this piece I wanted the color to be a little more striking and pure when you take these transparent colors like this and you vac stack them or lay them over clear or do anything like that you lose some of the pureness of the color and what I really want in this piece is I want the color to be as pure as possible so that it it just blends right into everything else so now I'm gonna melt in all this coil here I think I got about about 3/4 of a stick I think this is going to be enough sometimes the Herbert Arnold torches get a little they make sound at certain points in the flame like different different flame sizes can make it kind of loud or quieter it's still pretty quiet even when the Arnold gets loud for an Arnold yeah how many other torches that's pretty quiet yeah Carlile's are much louder yeah actually oops I'm gonna melt this in here and once I get this all into a nice bubble and I opened it up on the end and then connect that pattern onto the end of this and then work it into a disc a disc shape I don't want to make the disc too large I think 2 inches maximum is what I'm going for here because I want it to be a wearable pendant I mean some people do like to be flavor flav but I'm trying to you know be a little more conservative not used to having this mic here keep knocking the handle on it the other way that I could have made this tube with the rod is I could have could have gathered the rod up into it like 25 millimeter puck and then I could have pushed an indention into it with the tungsten pick and pushed it all the way in all the way through it and then blew blow it out after that but it takes a little bit longer and I on a disc like this a smaller disc you don't really see the coil marks very much all right I hope that's enough color I think it is but may have to add a little bit probably I'm just gonna add just a little bit to this funny questions funny online questions I bet there's some really want funny ones they couldn't ask me so to add a little bit of color to this bubble here I'm just gonna actually just push it on to the end and blow it out off this bubble that's already here I don't need a whole lot more just just a little bit more I'm going to chill the glass right here on the edge and then blow out okay that should be enough right there probably only another two inches of color didn't need too much more I just have a mental picture of how large that disk is in my mind and I'm kind of going off of that I've gotten really good at making you know taking a mental picture of what I'm working on and not having to take it out of the kiln and look at it but uh if you're unsure that just use calipers it works really good I still use calipers a lot all right got that all blown out and I think I have enough color now this bubble needs to be the same diameter as the flip for me to add it to it it could this bubble could be a little smaller than the flip that I did and then I just have to flare open a little wider than the bubble is which is totally doable but ideally having the bubble the same size as as what you want now if I were in the hot shop I would had this done like in like one minute [Laughter] Here I am sitting here making this bubble for the last 15 20 minutes if only we could just gather it have it molten already yeah I mean I've played around with Bordeaux furnaces a little bit you can you can get one they run it 23:50 about and then you dip in there with your long tube of say 25 millimeter tubing or something like that you can dip right in there it's really hot when you open that thing up ripping hot gotta wear gloves and stuff especially gathering from vertically right above the furnace that will certainly cook you pretty good so I just kind of held this in the flame and while I was rotating and gently puffed a hole open got to be careful not to blow too hard or you'll blow bubble trash bubble trash is where you just heat up a bubble really thin and blow it out until it just pops and then glitter goes everywhere and you're like whew but it's really bad for you so you don't want to do that as sparkly and beautiful as it might look you can actually blow glass as thin as cellophane and yeah potentially breathe it in as it's floating through the air we're not really looking for that we do get that question every once in a while two people wonder if you can blow so hard that you actually pop the bubble and yeah we do it intentionally sometimes had that whistle going because the hole was just the right size and the flame had just the right velocity that was like a little flute in the flame hitting the edge of it so I've got this a little tweezer jacks here and I'm gonna open this up now in the hot shop most people would would go up and they would hold the jacks underhand with this small Jack's I have actually have to hold this straight and then go down because I have more stability going down with my left hand there's no weight in this really so it's a little bit different than hot chop jacks so I'm still I'm thinking of that mental picture of how large in diameter my disk is in the kiln and I'm gonna open this to what I think it is we'll see how close I get is there any wax I think I'm in the right place right I could probably just come right over here oh yeah thanks guys no no this is great any wax is good wax when you need it yeah if they quote me on that I'm gonna probably shoot myself so you Xin says any wax is good wax [Laughter] Thanks so I think I'm almost opened up big enough here just I think one more time of opening here nice even heat base and just one more should be good right there I'm totally guessing though might have to open it a little bit more thank you don't trip on the cord good call I actually need a Kevlar pad but I don't have one so it looks like I actually opened it a little too big but it's not too hard for me to close this down a little I'm just gonna get some heat into this pattern close this guy down oh that's perfect yep that's all I need it for thank you thank you so I think that should be good I'm gonna I'm gonna make it a little smaller well I think actually that was perfect because I wanted to touch the clear to touch the bros a so I'm gonna I'm gonna put this together cold in the flame aren't cold out of the flame and then I'm going to connect it in the flame just kind of pushing together it's not actually welded together but by putting it in the flame and melting after I place it cold I can make it connect and now it's connected then I'm going to heat up this whole edge give it a little Marv down kind of connecting that kind of seals it on nice I'm gonna get it sealed on really nice and then I'll take that punty off the end so a little puff probably actually going to leave that punty on just for now because I have to shape the disc in the back part looks like I got a nice connection here it's sealing on really good didn't catch any air bubbles I don't think and I'm really focusing the heat on this connection point because I don't want there to be any uh acute angles or anything like that I'm spinning both directions so I don't twist up the pattern once again okay that's looking pretty good now to make the disc so I'm gonna make this crisp edge here how I go about doing that as I heat the transparent color the bros a and I puff it out a little bit it thins the color out in that spot and then I can go in and make a sharp angle there so I want this to be a really nice squared off disc so now I'm pushing together and puff it one more time I'm gonna push together some more and when I get it to a certain point here I'm going to push it on the marver on the edge here to crisp up the edge so we got one edge I'm going to do the other edge I'm gonna have to go back to the front and melt this a little bit just to get it extra crisp up so I thin the color out again I knock that out of the way a little bit so I thin the color out a little bit and now I'm going to do the exact same thing I did on the the front part just gonna repeat that I'm using my Marber pad to make some some shaping here crisping up the edges going between the outside edge and the top of the marver pad almost there one more edge edge of the disk marvering here and it'll be ready to melt the front and then I'm gonna pop two holes and this thing will be done almost just got to tear the back off so I got to be careful tearing this punty off it's really easy to melt your design if you're not careful so I'm waiting for it to cool before I go back in on it this bros a is actually looking really pretty nice can't see it from where you guys are but it's got a really nice glow kind of like the way the light is going through it it's getting all that clear off you let it cool a little bit more all right I think I got the funky all the way off now I'm going to melt the face flat first they got to puff it out a little bit puffing this out is just gonna kind of even the thickness up a little bit when I did that seal initially it was a little bit it's just a little bit thick there and I don't want that to pop later or have any cracking issues so a little puff out and then melt it back in it should be good all right got the pattern all the way flat using the paddle to just flatten it out the rest of the way zucchini is puff on that on the out looks good and now I'm going to pop the two little holes got to figure out where I want to pop them so I'm using the light from the torch to give me a little bit more light and is this just an aesthetic choice as to how you want the the pattern to hang yeah yeah I'm gonna choose this way so I'm not gonna pop this hole all the way just gonna get it to about that point then I'm gonna do the other one try to evenly spaced it so that it's the pattern hangs evenly all right got the other one open I'm just gonna kind of take a look at this and see if they're even because I can make adjustments right now looks like I need to go over just a tad with one of them I'm going to do it with this one here and really close though I have like a couple reference points on the pattern that I'm going off of and instead of blowing these open I'm actually going to pick them open I want these holes to be big enough that you can fit a chain through this gonna open them a little bit you should break in the internet or YouTube and Facebook numbers are through the roof today Oh awesome yes I guess you're popular out there on the internet who knew I've been posting a lot for sure for a long time all right almost there just trying to make these holes as even as possible had to remove a little bit of excess material there all right the holes are done so now I got to do the e last step which is put a punt e to the center of my beautiful pattern a cold seal I know I'm living dangerously here I could do a hot seal if I wanted to so I'm gonna get it nice and warm in the center so where I get a glow basically how we go about cold seals so I got a glow there as that glow goes away I'm gonna connect this punty but I want to do a really small connection like probably four mil connection and glow is still there so I'm gonna wait just a second longer heating the punty up give it one last heat and I'm going to connect it that should be good right there it's not perfectly on center but I don't need it to be on there for too long got to be really mindful of your punty as you can knock this right off of here and he'll have it on the floor that won't be fun although I've had these discs survive drops they're very sturdy for some reason this shape and remove a little bit of excess glass from the back of this I just want this to be flat I don't want it to be a bubble in the back so keeping a nice even rotation I'm just gonna melt this until it goes flat I'm holding it downward a little bit to help even the glass out and that should be it right there I'm gonna give it a little paddling on the back just to crisp up that edge a little one more melt and it's slightly concave on the back I kind of like that aesthetic and that's going to be it right there I'm gonna heat up this paddle basically boom and then I'm gonna fire polish the center and that should be good I could probably carry it to the kiln with these finishing tongs but I'm going to double up because I'm a little worried there we go [Music] you

Channel: Corning Museum of Glass

Views: 1,519,346

Rating: 3.7925301 out of 5

Keywords: Corning Museum of Glass, glass, glassmaking, flameworking, fillacello, pendant, Eusheen Goines, Guest Artist, glass pipe, pipemaking, glass pipemaking, pipe

Id: Gibt4KZBphU

Length: 224min 33sec (13473 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2018