Sean's fish bowl | You Design It; We Make It

welcome to the corning museum of glass this is the amphitheater hot shop and we have a really special little show for you this morning we're going to be making one of our you design it pieces so this is these are pieces that we make that people that visit the museum can design themselves and they sketch out their ideas and we'll pick one out during the week and make it at the end of the week on Sunday so this is Jeff Mack up here let's give him a round of applause he's going to be our gaffer help them helping them out as Lucas malonic yeah good for Lucas whoo in Murano Plaza yeah my name is Joe Falls onei and I'll be narrating the show and also helping out there in the process and me and Lucas might be switching off narrating during their in the middle of the show over here we have Amanda give her a round of other okay for Amanda she's going to be running our live stream we're actually streaming this live online so as long along with all you viewers here in this theater we also have many many viewers across the world that can see this if they would like to so what we're making today is this little object right over here we might have a image that we can put up on the screen I'm not really sure if we do or not other than they could say oh there we go yeah yeah see sometimes they have a they already have a shot already that's our image of what we're making here today it's two fish in a fishbowl and I don't know how to say that last name a handy mahat e Shawn mahat e designed this and he's from from Sarris Syracuse maybe Syracuse New York a local New Yorker so he's designed this piece and that's what we're making here today a couple fish in a fishbowl we're getting started off making the fish part Oh what are we doing this oh the rocks okay we're designing some of the design elements in the bottom part of the fish bowl they're the rocks and there's going to be some looks like some seaweed kind of stuff some coral life that kind of stuff going on at the bottom of the fish flow so we're kind of designing all the little decorative elements that are going to go inside the fish bowl first then we'll make the fish as well and we'll put all this aside in our garage so we have a one of our yes sure it's not heated up do you want me to flash it okay okay there's a smaller one - I just grabbed a big one I just grabbed the big shovel we just hang out here okay so yeah look like I said we're preparing some of the decorative elements he's making some of the little rocks that I go on to the bottom of the fishbowl we love a garage over here so this big black box that's over in the front of the stage over here we call that the garage and it does just that it parks our pieces so that they can stay warm and then we could come back to them a little bit later in the process we can't let anything cool down too much in glass once you start the glass process and the things get hot you have to keep them hot throughout the process if you let them cool down too much say much below 900 degrees Fahrenheit then they will crack so we have to keep everything nice and warm and then we could come back to it and attach it all and put it all together a little bit later so of course this comes in very handy when you're doing sculptural type of pieces like this and you have a lot of parts that you're going to be putting together more traditionally when you're putting together things like goblets or stemware you would definitely use the garage you'd make the maybe the cup sort of those types of things first and you can design the stems and the feet put it all together you can see every now and then I do have to flash what we call just taking a general heat it was what we call a flash and that's just an overall heat making sure everything stays nice and warm is that good you want me to put this up so you see we got a couple of rocks on there I could put it right into our garage the garage is sitting at about 900 20 degrees that's a nice stable temperature for us nice and warm so that stuff won't crack but it's not too warm to where everything is going to keep moving in there it's still going to stay pretty solid if we had it too hot in there then everything would kind of lose its shape so we have to get that really nice temperature there's a little bit about going what's going on here as Jeff is making some more parts he's gathered a little bit of clear glass out of our furnace now our furnace is right here in the middle a little bit about what you're looking at on the stage here is our furnace right here in the middle and this holds all of our molten glass so inside of this furnace is a giant tank that holds all the molten glass so inside of there when it's totally full is about a thousand pounds of molten glass now it's totally clear inside of there everything comes out of there clear that's glowing orange but that's just because of the intensity of the heat it is actually clear glass at 2100 degrees Fahrenheit or about 1150 degrees Celsius is the temperature of the glass when it comes out of there so at that temperature it's super excited you know all those molecules are jumping around and everything and letting off its own energy its own light source and that's why it's glowing you give you an idea of what that's like in nature lava coming out of a volcano is around that same temperature that's why molten rock appears to be glowing now we didn't keep it clear we can color it any different color we'd like Jeff rolled it into some white Fred so there's broken up colored glass up here in the front is what we call frit that's just broken up colored glass it comes in all kinds of different colors we actually order all of our color from a company in Germany called reckon Bach record box been making color for over 200 years and they probably have around 350 different types of color so they've got it down to a science they know what they're doing so we just order all of our color from them just like a painter would order paints and then we can apply it in all kinds of different ways now what actually gives us our color is different metals from metal oxides compound sulfides things like that we all remember the periodic table right from school an exciting table that we all had to memorize right so if you think about things like copper and cobalt they give you a nice blue color or iron oxide or rust give you a nice green Magon ease megha knees will give you a nice purple color cadmium will give you a nice yellow and even gold other than the glass will change the color of the glass and give you a nice ruby color so if you're like Ruby glass people might say you have a expensive taste which that would be me because I love Ruby glass looks like we're adding a little bit of color here to this are we making the fish now Jeff okay we're working on the fish now so there's a head with a little strip of color around each side everyone was shaking their head up there yes I remember the periodic table frame so that have been a long time ago does anybody remember this is quiz time now what the atomic number of cobalt is where you were shaking your head yes I thought you remember the periodic table get out the phones we got to Google this now it's 27 I'll give you a hint 27 so every time we do a little bit to the glass a little bit of tooling or adding color or whatever it is then we got to go back into our reheating chamber get it nice and soft again we only have a limited amount of time to work the glass before it cools off too much say 20-30 seconds then we have to go back into our reheating chamber and get it nice and soft so like I was Sonia earlier this is our furnace in the middle over here is our reheating chamber now there are around the same temperature our furnaces about 2100 degrees the reheating chamber might be a little hotter maybe around 2300 degrees now there isn't any glass inside the reheating chamber it's just an empty voided space of heat that we can use to reheat the glass now our reheating chamber is we do turn on and off at the end of the day they take about an hour to heat up so at the end of the day we'll shut them off in the morning we'll turn them back on but the furnace in the middle that stays on all the time 24 hours a day seven days a week never goes off it's uh just a lot more efficient to keep that furnace on because it's something you can't just really turn off no there's all that glass inside of there and the lining of the furnace now has a coating of glass because of the charging of the glass that we've done over the years so if you just turned it off and let it cool down right away it would actually just crack apart and it would totally destroy the inside of the furnace so in order to turn that off we have to do it very slowly probably take about a week maybe a little longer to turn that off so that's why we just keep it on all the time now eventually you do have to turn it off and make repairs but this has actually been running since we built this amphitheater about two years ago so this furnace has been on for two years we're planning to or hoping to get at least like another four years before we have to do any real maintenance to it so it's a big production to be able to turn these things off that's why I'm glad I don't pay the gas bill I just work here but you can imagine those are your biggest expenses resilience to do is paying your electric bills paying your gas bill these are your largest expenses of course and running a studio color and things like that can get quite costly all right so Luca so let me get all the way of the camera there Lucas is bringing over another little bit you can see Jeff just twirled on that little bit of color guessing that's going to be maybe part of the fin Lucas is pulling out a nice little stringer we'll probably use for decoration a little bit later you see how stretchable glasses and you can stretch glass thinner than a human hair which is pretty awesome it's got a lot of crazy properties that's a it's a poor conductor of heat cools off really quickly you see how fast that's stiffened up but it's a great insulator just kind of what kind of odd so where it has mass it'll actually hold heat that glass what it's cold you won't conduct like you can't won't conduct electricity you can't send electrical tires to glass when it's cold but when it's hot you can so it's different from what it's hot and cold now they have actually developed certain types of glasses that you can send electrical charges through a luminous silicate they call them and these are the type of glasses that you might find you know in your laptops your cell phones things like that a question yes um I don't know have you ever practiced with clay Jeff he's concentrating really hard right now yes well the thing is to the a lot of us as glass blowers might have started off in clay I know I did before we found glass as a medium it's very common that a lot of glass blowers may be started in another medium and clay is usually the one that most glass blowers started at often what about G Lucas did you do something else before glass so hit Luke yeah Jude said he worked in jewelry and bronze so I used to do metal work before working in glass what about you Jeff do you work in another medium before glass sure he says kind of trading hard on the fish here here we go putting on some decorative elements he's got a focus he's got about 3,000 degrees torch in his hand so probably best I don't distract him but you can see he's got that little stringer of glass and that torch he's able to just heat up thats trigger and then he can sort of draw with it it's kind of just like drawn with a little pencil or something like that he'd drawn little lines onto the side of the fish again you can do so much to it and then Lucas is going to have to go back take a quick little flash heat it up make sure that whole piece stays nice and warm then when he comes back you can draw some more decorative elements on there and you'd see Jeff has got a glove on his hand because he's pretty close to that torch like I said that torch is probably around 3,000 degrees it's oxygen and propane so it's a concentrated amount of heat so that he can spot heat a certain area but for the most part we don't wear gloves in here unless you're doing very specific kind of work like that we usually use need the dexterity with your hands to be able to turn the pipe to be able to use the tools it'd be kind of like playing the guitar with gloves on a little difficult to do alright so we don't typically wear gloves in here a lot of people ask well don't the pipes heat up the pipes you know they get warm but you can see on the pipe a little bit of discoloration towards the bottom that's about as far as that heat really travels up so maybe only about a foot from the end of the pipe here that's about as far as that heat usually travels these are stainless steel so stainless steel is a pretty poor conductor of heat actually and that glass like I said that glass is cooling off so quickly it doesn't really have the energy to transfer that heat into this into this pipe so that's why they don't really heat up throughout the process allows us to hold it with just our bare hand it looks like an eyeball to me I think that's an eyeball so fish is coming together maybe that's a sin yeah that's another fan that's what that is got a couple fins on there you can see this is obviously the what would be the front of the fish is a depart that's attached to the punky so we're making the tail end of the fish first and we'll probably have to transfer this on to another pipe to flip it around so that we can finish the top half of it and typically what we do in most of our glassblowing pieces whether it's sculpting or below and work you typically will make half of the piece first or the bottom half or whatever it is that you're working on and then you'll flip the piece around and work on the other half second that's a very traditional way of blowing glass you you finished the bottom half of whatever it is down here first then you'll punty it flip it around and then you'll finish your top half secondly it's pretty traditional way blown-glass it looks like we're getting ready to do that right now actually I think Jeff is getting up the punky gathered a little bit of glass out of our furnace so anytime I refer to a punny that's as the solid steel rod as opposed to the blowpipe which has a hollow shaft through the middle so he's got a solid stainless steel rod a little bit of glass on the end this is just spot heating the tip of that punny here we go I'll attach it I'll be towards the thin part and it looks like he's going to attach it right at the fin and put a little water on there and that'll stress the glass well that just breaks it free that's it done yeah you applied for that got 3/4 of a fish I would say almost a whole fish how are we doing over here doing well about 170 people watching that's pretty good well hello to everyone online welcome no no questions yet okay you just let me know so it looks like Jeff has brought out some barrini he's going to use for the eyes so Marini it's kind of tough to see this is just a tiny little piece you might be able to get a close-up here when he actually attaches it I'll put one out on the marver I don't know if the AV people will get a close-up of that or not but it's basically a piece of cane so cane work is like this here is just a piece of color that we gather clear over and we'll stretch it out into a long stringer or a long thin line now a piece of Marini has actually got a design in the middle of it so we'll put together a bunch of colors in this case we have like a looks like a like a darker green in the middle surrounded by a lighter blue a couple different shades of blue so it's layered up and a couple different layers and then we'll pull that out into a long stringer and when you cut it up and you put it on what you're doing is you're looking at the cross-section of that so the design you design it you pull it out and then you cut it up until all these small little pieces and then you're actually looking at the cross-section of that piece I don't know if we have an example up here or you can see he's putting on as a good close-up there see that that little dot well I that's a little chunk of Marini here's a here's a good example up here this is from our our Tiffany shows that we do here you could see all these little rose petals that are on this little cylinder right here each one of those rose petals is another piece of Marini so that's a cross-section of something that was designed here's a good example right here this tree actually all the little spots on this little tree is all Marini work shovel the same one the rocks are or differently oh okay ready for it okay so it looks like we got the fist designed here and just like the rocks we're going to take it off put it on this little shovel yeah and we got this on the shovel I can put it into our garage and we could come back to it later so again just assembling parts right now making a fish number two so it looks like we're working on fish number two now so that first fish was white and orange and the second one has got a little purple on it if you could show our drawing again possibly can we get it can we get a view of our drawing that we're doing from the AV booth please thank you very much so if you're just joining us this is what we're attempting right here so we've made the first fish the orange and the white one there we're working on the purple on the white one now we've made some rocks that are going to be going on to the bottom of our fishbowl so just assembling all of our pieces together we're try to copy these drawings as close as we can to you know the actual drawing colors and everything so this is our you design it we make it program that we have here at the corner museum is to fish in a fishbowl by Sean mehandi Sean Behati the heady I think he's got a Syracuse New York so Sean if you're out there making your famous that's a question one second it's hard to hear up here go ahead yes after we design it or after we make it we'll contact them and certainly if they want it and we'll send it out to them sometimes they'd be surprised they're actually like to know but of course a lot of times they do want it so we'll send it out to them yeah if you'd like to design a piece you can certainly do that today that's right behind our admissions desk so right behind the admissions area above the cafe there's a little area where you can draw your own design and who knows we might be making your piece next week you never know so we're adding up some more purple color again that Purple's got mega D's in there turn up that purple color and to check on our fish over here see how they're doing it looks looks good in there he's put on that little bit color and Jeff is just using the tweezers there to kind of tweeze out and shape the fin you you know Lucas is gathering up a little bit more glass think can we get an animation of that uh what it looks like gathering glass sir is it not I'm going to check it you you that's on now you can see they're working as a team up here make this fish happen a lot of things you can't do by yourself on the glass studio but but not many you're pretty limited working solo yes sure sure you want it this way that way doesn't matter same side like I said you do work in as a team up here well I'm helping Jeff out holding his peace while he creates the lines and the design elements Lukas is over there creating another bit of glass it'll probably end up being the tail I think it's going to be the tail of the piece if you're doing the tail right maybe let's call the tail yes like Marini nice let me check I don't see any orange I don't really see any Marinis at all that actually got cleaned up over there the other day all right we'll just set them down here for you got on some you'd be proud of us Jess we cleaned up back there so it's hard to find them Eddie on another bit of glass there's going to be the tail she's cutting right through that with shears I'm glasses super hot you could just cut right through it with shears now they're not anything super special they're just stainless steel they don't have diamond blades or anything like that but they're pretty sharp the sheers are at least but when the glass is really hot you just cut right through it there's all kinds of different types of sheers these are you see these ones kind of small little trimming shears a little bit larger we even have sheers to call duckbill sheers here you can see they got that curved blade on them so all kinds of different sheers for different kinds of cutting applications we even have these ones called diamond sheers so pretty unique that but they're made of diamond it's just because of that diamond shape that they make so it's really good for cutting bits of glass little round bits of glass you put it right in there let's also got this nice little curve right at the tip of the blade right there that's great for grabbing onto that blowpipe you can grab onto that blowpipe they're not sharp at the end you can just grab that blowpipe especially where it's nice and hot and then you can move it around so there's a little extension of your hand right there of course you can't grab it with your hand but you got those diamond sheers that come in really handy for stuff like that it looks like we're making another punty getting ready to take this fish off so move it right along we've got one fish over here in our garage already we've got a few rocks in the garage made up Jeff is just about to transfer over the other fish onto a plenty there goes so you see put that little bit of water on there and it shocks a glass now if you drop water on the glass when it came right out of the furnace at 2,000 degrees it would probably just evaporate or just roll right off it wouldn't actually do anything it's like if you drop hot water or water on a really hot pan it just kind of jumps around it doesn't actually do anything but when the glass gets a little bit cooler that water does have an effect it will actually shock the correct glass make a little tiny cracks and that's how we're able to break it because actually a name for that I can't remember what the effect is there's some scientifical name for that one of the other glass blowers told me once some sort of effect that's a lead-in frost effect thank you google yeah that's what it's called when the water evaporates super quickly from the surface so I got that fish fish flipped around fish flipped a tough one creating the little the lips of the fish or the mouth we'll call it the mouth fish lips always going back in to get another reheat know if I talked about that view yet but that's that's a pretty cool view you're seeing right now looking to the inside of our reheating chamber that's a pretty unique view that we have here at the Corning Museum we don't see that nothing any other studio a lot of people wonder what kind of crazy GoPro can you jump inside a volcano with but it's actually a regular camera where I add in some more glass for another part of the fin that is actually a regular camera it's not actually sitting inside of that reheating chamber of course it would just burn it right up instantly it's sitting behind the reheating chamber and it's looking through a little glass window there's a little fan back there that's kind of keeping the camera a little bit cool but it's the window itself that's actually really protecting it from the heat that might raise another question why isn't the glass window melting well it's a special kind of glass it's not the same type of glass that we're using type of glass that we're using is called a soda-lime glass which is actually the most common kind of glass out there so what you see all the windows and you know your glass at home and bottles and things like that that's all soda lime glass it's the most common kind of glass out there in the world a glass that makes up that window that gives us that special view inside of that reheating chamber is a fused silica glass so that's one of the more pure forms of glass being made from just pure fused silica it's very hard to manufacture type of glass but it gives it a much higher melting temperature at about 4,000 degrees that's why it's able to withstand that kind of heat now it's got some pretty interesting qualities just like withstanding the heat it's also got some great optical qualities it's super clear so that a lot of impurities in it a few silica glass was actually invented right here in corny by accordion incorporated back in the 1930s interesting thing is a when they invented it they really didn't know what to do with it they just had this glass and we're kind of like well the sure will have a purpose someday it wasn't till around the 60s when NASA came along and said that we need a special kind of glass to protect our space shuttles to be able to use on the windshields so that's Corning said they had just the thing and they used that fused silica glass some of the windows of the space shuttles coming over all right so we got another fish on there put it back in their garage keep it nice and warm here we are like two fish down so I was talking a little bit about that few silica glass they also use that glass in fiber optics so same kind of go after using fiber optics because it's got that really clear optical quality it could give we do to animation of the gathering process we've got Lucas here's a good animation if you're looking up upon our screens they're kind of a cross-section of what's going on when we go into that furnace and gather you can see there's a ceramic crucible inside of there dip the rod just below the surface of the glass and we spin it around and it gathers up on the end of that rod or turn it in one direction and it spools up on the end kind of just like gathering honey up on a honeycomb and then sexing a lot like honey we like to say that when glass first comes out of the furnace it's about the consistency of honey so that's moving around pretty good that's why we're always turning the rod back and forth we have to keep it rotating to be able to keep that glass one on center but more importantly just to keep it on the end of the rod I'll give you a quick example I'm talking about here I gather up a little bit of glass here I got to keep at Ernie keep that centered on the rod I stopped turning could see how fast gravity just takes over it's just like honey just dripping right off the end of that rod it's actually still spooling off the end of that round there so if we just kind of let glass be glass that's really what it wants to be is a hot mess on the ground so that's day one glass blowing right there make that's what you make day one little bit more impressed right with what these guys are doing not easy takes a lot of time while the practice a lot of muscle memory to really figure out how that glass is moving one of the more difficult things to learn when you're a beginner is just that turning motion just to get that muscle memory and grayned in your brain that you got a turn all the time turn turn turn turn turn that's what you're beginning glass teacher always tells you a turn turn turn now Jeff over here is using our pipe cooler so I'm talking about the pipes warming up sometimes you know when you go in that furnace you have to go a little deep and they do warm up a little little further than you'd like then they're comfortable with you know so in order to cool it down so it's comfortable for you to use we have these little pipe coolers it's a little trough when you can fill it full of water and then just run the pipe through it cools it down really nice alright I'm going to going to turn the mic over to our next to MC Lukas malonic it's going to take over and fill you in on some of the information going on here on stage thank you all for joining all right hi everybody my name is Lucas I'm going to be talking a little bit about the glass demonstration we switch every now and then just to keep things fresh because as this piece gets bigger and bigger Joe's going to need to jump in help out a little bit more now I don't really remember what Joe said so making or something's place if I see a lot of heads going like this I'll know to stop and switch to another topic but Jeff is going to gather up a lot of glass here for the bowl and we're going to embed all of those little fish and other pieces that we've made inside of there so it'll be a solid glass fishbowl with all with all the little fish components inside the glass the technique called submerse Oh a lot of our names for techniques and tools are Italian because they were invented by the Italians now this is something I've never really seen done before so it's kind of a rare technique to do things like this so just be really exciting for you guys to see I think now I'm looking at this and I'm looking at the picture and I have a little bit of experience as a glassblower myself so I think what's going to happen here is we have that flat lower half of the hemisphere we're going to put the fish inside that and then we're going to drop another gather of glass on top now if we want the fish to be at different layers we could add in separate layers of glass do big half hemisphere of glass then fish then another one but again I've never really seen this done before so I'm not sure if I'm right always a surprise with these shows I am just that I'm right so that makes me right now the tool he's using right there is that newspaper is about ten sheets to folded up newspaper and we'll take it and fold into thirds so that's 30 sheets big and then we'll fold that again in thirds so it's 90 sheets thick and not stick enough to protect our hands when the intense heat of the glass now it doesn't stick to the glass because we keep it wet and it's creating a thin layer scheme between the piece and the piece of newspaper so there's no ash that's really sticking on unless you don't wet your newspaper and that's part the assistants job and part the gaffers job to know that that's what's going on so we work together to keep things running smoothly for like a well-oiled machine all right so we're going to start building this piece up from the bottom I believe and our next step is to add in the rocks at the bottom so if you look at the drawing there's some little brown rocks at the bottom that's a nice cute little fish tank and we're going to pull them out of our garage this is holding at about a thousand degrees and keeps our glass and the kind of a safe point where we can be sure it's not going to break due to thermal stress from rapid cooling but we can also confidently put it inside of our reheating chamber at 2300 degrees so that temperature shift is about a thousand degrees and if we took it in a 2,000 degree shift from room temperature in there it's going to explode and crack and make a big mess and ruin our work so we don't want to do that I'm going to do this instead see one of the door right Dori we'll get the door those are reheating furnace if you look inside you can see a little bit of sand at the bottom that's to prevent the glass from what if it were to crack on the inside to prevent it from melting down in between the cracks and the brick if it does that when we turn the hole off at the end of the day it's going to melt in and then it's going to expand as it cools and it's going to crack our brick and it will ruin the lining and that thing's really expensive so you don't want to do that now Joe is keeping those hot it's a little bit hard in the studio because we have these awesome air-conditioning vents up here in the floor and they fold down it's pretty cool this is one of the only hot shops where you'll actually get cold working on stage but he's going to bring it out from that heat and we'll place them in into the glass so this is where the submerse oh is beginning maybe just a little one more time looks like Jeff is spot heating one point and I think that so that he can press it in further and make sure there's no bubbles the hardest part of this technique is going to be making sure there's no bubbles if we have an undercut when we drop clear glass down if it fills in that undercut it's going to trap air inside there and it's going to make a bubble and we don't want bubbles if you want to blow people's minds so here he's putting it on the edge of the piece there you're going to like pay for that back in towards the center or yeah okay so it looks like he has this disc and we're actually going to redistribute that mass with the glass back towards the center so these kind of laying out the design for this paperweight the fishbowl as he's doing and he's going to redistribute all of that towards the center now the whole time we're working with the glass we're keeping it at a temperature of above 1,000 degrees so if you keep that in mind it's really difficult to maintain heat through something so thick we have lots of pieces up here and these are very thin now these are just like few millimeters and thickness it's hard to blow very thin glass but you know I've tried blowing thin glass as it's learn about what's really difficult is making very thick glass because the temperature is a lot different across the thickness of the piece so the inside of that piece right now sitting it might still be you know 1,800 degrees but the outside is cooling down very quickly because that's the part that's uh that's that's you know in the furnace and out in the environment so there's a lot of temperature stress there and we're trying to keep the whole thing relatively even so that it doesn't crack whilst it cracks there's you can sort of fix it but you're always going to know it cracked there you can make it stable again but like I'm on duty okay just a preheat and bring it over this one door should I have both doors yeah I'll do both all right so I'm going to bring out these fish here we've got them on the left side of the garage well my left your right and there's a big burner on this side and the closer we get it to that burner the hotter it's going to be so if we want things if we're putting something in here for a really long time like hours an hour so to put it on the right side at first and that's just going to hold it like 900 we can be absolutely certain it's not going to move then we move it over to the other side when we're about ready to use it and that's going to bring up to a thousand and then we can put it in the reheating furnace so I'm doing right now got this pretty close to the burner you know we're ready to go here whenever we get the word we're going to start putting fish inside our fish bowl back in the garage okay lots of running around this morning okay so the second fish is safely back in the garage and now that I'm looking at the picture I'm looking at this I'm going to change what I said before I think what's going to happen is we'll drop another piece on top of that and it will flip its axis so yeah yeah we'll probably put another punty down by where that rock is and then we'll transfer it kind of sideways when we do a regular transfer on a piece we're going to attach that punny at the bottom and then just transfer it from one side to the other for this we're going to you know make our piece this way then we're going to attach our punny here and that's going to switch the axis instead of turning on this axis we're turning on this axis that's going to let us flip around the imagery inside that glass now Christmas started gathering for the eat next the next big drop and you're going to get to see a lot of glass moving pretty quickly because we're just going to drop on a big gob on top of that and then try and get the two pieces to merge they look like they're one so Joe has a little bit of green color bar right mr. green yeah so I think there's going to be the seaweed in our drawing and probably just by putting some stripes there we'll be able to trap that in the center when we drop on that second bit of glass so here we go now every time Jeff touches hot glass the hot glass it totally fuses it it's a self welding material and you know as soon as that bit goes on there we can cut it off we can sorta fix it but it's never going to be quite the same we're gonna have to remove some serious material and take some serious time to fix our mistakes so the key with glassblowing is to get it right the first time takes a lot of practice to do thick Jessamine working here for two years so before that he used to work at the Toledo Museum on Ohio and he was we're going to refer quite a long time blowing glass just about all his life there's would be a extra seaweed and he'll crimp it flat give it a twist and then he'll press that flat and because he's putting that twist in there it's going to give a little bit of dimensionality even though we are going to be flattening that to almost two dimensions now we have to work relatively two-dimensional in this step because we don't want to we don't want to trap any bubbles again so if we're having some kind of weird shape or it's like lifting up there's an undercut we lift up the fishtail there will be an undercut underneath there and we'll trap a bubble so we're trying not to do hi guys welcome this is our morning show we're doing a you design it piece every Sunday we make a piece that someone else is drawn in our Museum we have like a little coloring area sometimes it's a kid sometimes it's a 47 year old so it never hurts to try we pick projects that look like fun and this one's really cool it's giving us a chance to try out this technique called submerse oh and some Italian where it is kind of like submerged and we're going to encase this it with another blob of glass and the fish is going to be on the inside it's going to look really magical you guys are all going to be in on the secret but you can blow your friends minds especially no pictures okay so be hostile to the fish before the show and now we're going to add the other elements there's some rocks in there there's some seaweed might be some gravel at the bottom I'm not really sure but we're going to add all that together the coral would be fun too we doin coral on this yeah okay great lots of little intricate work there so should be fun for us to see those Jeff Macke he's one of our master glass blowers some blowing glass for very long time and I joined today by Chris Rochelle and drove belzoni and they're both really great glass blowers very experienced you can see in just the way he's keeping that on center he's constantly turning the blowpipe and you know it doesn't even look like it's moving when Chris is doing that but I assure you if you were to stop turning it would just drop right to the floor and burn whatever was down there yeah so one of the really hard things about Krista's job right now is he's got to bring this bit over in the exact way that Jeff is expecting and what Jeff is looking for right now is a nice round shape but an extreme heat it needs to be hot the whole way through we can't have a cold core and that's so that this glass is really going to flow off the blowpipe it's really going to want to drop as soon as Chris stops turning what's that music for Christmas you've got a turn about you know eight to ten pounds of glass got to keep it turning with his hands he's got to keep it on center all right now here's the drop I'll get out of everyone's way because this is going to be really cool you're going to see what happens when Chris stops turning but first he's going to get it as hot as he can see starting to put his body weight into it to keep that thing on center because as soon as it falls even just an inch off center it becomes a lot harder to flip that weight back up here it goes drop it on and it's like a big droplet I always love looking at really hot glass because it just looks oh it looks like candy or something because it's clear and it's giving off that bright orange light but this glasses of around 2100 degrees could be even hotter than that because our reheating furnace is actually two thousand three hundred degrees both are powered by natural gas burners in fact our torches are natural gas as well but the smaller one that you'll see later in the show is going to be a propane well I'm not Joe this is Joe he's running the second rock over so add a little bit more dimensionality where we drop that other pancake on there and we're going to attach the next layer pieces so we can do like looks like this might be two layers of um two layers of glass and then we'll drop a third one that's just gonna be like a cap so your ghosty brings it over we want to be really quick with these tweezers because all of our steel tools are sucking out heat from the glass in fact even the blowpipe is sucking out glass or sucking out heat from the glass if you look at the blowpipe it is clear around there and the blowpipe has lost that red orange glow unless because the blowpipe is taking that heat distributing out throughout the pipe now we're also being pretty selective with where we're heating we'll put the whole thing in there just to keep it above a thousand degrees and then we'll kind of pull it back a little bit and try and focus the heat on the part that we want to work again the weirder the projects that we get in here at the more intense the communication gets we do really strange things like this you know we're Jeff hasn't tried this before quick believe it or not he told me this morning and certainly not none of us at least not myself have done anything like this so uh you know it's a chance for us to try something new post our own limits and we'll eventually send out the final piece to whoever draws it so make sure you get out there it's right by the artist cafe and the innovation stage it's kind of a floor in between those those two points and you'll see the divider wall and you can draw a picture for us we love looking through them - there's a big stack back there about this thick and some of them are really cute so from her job like kids and what was really fun my favorite are the ones that the kids draw and then the kid doesn't know what to write for the description so the parent tries to explain it we had another one with a pig and a popsicle and the pigs eating the popsicle and the parent was saying that it was a metaphor for all mankind and it's an image of the eternal struggle of man it was really well thought out I liked it a lot all right back to the action you can see Jeff is he's kind of drawing on the glass with this oxy propane torch it's actually not propane it's natural gas so what we'd call that but it's a flammable gas being shot out with oxygen we have an oxygen tank in the back and it's really hot it's our hottest torch and hottest heat source that we have here in the shop and he can just heat up the end of the glass with that and kind of draw with it like a pencil and that's how he's doing the coral and this drawing all right so Joe's got another rap what's that one gonna be Joe that's not working to be you know more seaweed okay so we're going to add another layer of seaweed on this that's the same color we used before we just put it inside this garage to hold it as a nice steady temperature so it doesn't break you can see he's wearing your glove and interestingly we don't really wear gloves on the hot shop not until we start using torches or we start working on really big things and let's because it really hurts our hand coordination you know we can't we lose the feel that we have with our tools we lose a lot of things and it actually kind of becomes much more difficult to wear gloves well glassblowing and much more dangerous too because a lot of gloves it's get hot glass on it so it's going to melt the glove so we try to stay away from gloves the other thing is that our blow pipes are made out of Steel our Punky rods are made at well stainless steel and the difference between steel and stainless steel if you heat one end of a piece of steel and say it's five feet the five feet at the other end is going to get hot a lot sooner than if you're heating five feet of stainless steel and that's because stainless steel is a really poor conductor of heat whereas deal is a little bit better steel isn't you know heat proof but yeah if we had a copper blowpipe that thing would be hot as soon as you put it in the furnace I had a teacher tell me one time it's because copper is just so bad at being a metal it actually doesn't have a lot of the properties that other metals have that's why it conducts electricity really well and it's very malleable and at work hardens while it's cold so if you want to make steel soft again you'll cool it down very slowly if you want copper to be very cold again you'll just throw in a big bucket of water and it's cold pretty much instantly all right so here's more seaweed twisting those up pressing them in again we don't want to trap bubbles so we'll make sure we press it pretty flat you can see we're starting to build dimension there now now the fish is kind of behind the coral and we'll put that back in the garage for later so I'd like to say thanks to watching for all of our livestream people out there thanks for watching guys are great you're what keeps the program going now we have we're actually live streaming right now so everyone on stage is actually being streamed over the internet I'm talking to Amanda over there she's in charge of our social media and other things like that and others what do you say 130 people what are we up to now 180 so I need to read 180 thank-you letters that's a lot I'm going to be busy tonight yeah so yeah it's great you know it's what 11 o'clock in the morning and people are watching this all right Chris is over here it's a tiny little gob of glass and that's going to get a lot bigger pretty quick probably going to take three gathers and that's going to be the next layer of clear glass on top of those imagery now he's also preheating the spot where he's going to put the fish and he wants it to be really hot there so you can just press it in if we press it in because of the way we've shaped that fish we're not going to trap any air bubbles so it's going to slowly and develop the whole fish and then we'll get it halfway then when we drop the big gob on top it'll sandwich in there perfectly sorry is you suck it on you can see I'm really squeezing that in there now the first fish has a little buddy you're swimming around in there now we don't really use terms I'll get the door we don't really use terms of weight to describe how much glass we're using we'll use terms of how many gathers it is so I'll hold up some examples here we don't really have here's a good one gathered piece so this Cup this little potato Cup is one gather of glass with color on the outside and this is about the size that we're limited to with one gather now if we want to get a little bit bigger we can go up to two gathers and you know something like this the body of this so - the foot and son the body of this is about two gathers most of our pieces that we make here are going to be two gathers this one might be two really big gathers now then you start getting up into the oversized pieces and this one here was like three big gathers so that might be for this one might be four or five and with these big ones it gets kind of weird because you're adding on extra weight and the weight of these handles wasn't on there but when they blew the piece so if you got pretty comfortable with that weight and then they added on like six or seven more pounds of glass so you can imagine it gets pretty pretty wild pretty quickly in addition to the weight we're also dealing with the weight of the blowpipe now some of our blow plants we have blow pipes that are really thin therefore making really tiny things like goblets and defeat for goblets and things like that and then we also have bigger blow pipes we have one back there that's so big that it has a steering wheel on it because it requires so much torque to keep it turning use it to make a giant sea turtle inside of that huge reheating furnace over there and you know some guy was constantly turning that steering wheel keeping it twisting now this will not I probably estimate this thing it's probably six or seven pounds not incredibly have you but if you're moving it around all day with the weight of the glass on the end it kind of ruins your mechanical advantage because you have this big weight and you can't hold it right there so you're kind of holding it back and leveraging down with your back arm do you want to keep your hand spread and you'll see Jeff doing that and all these guys but we're kind of running into the same problem here with elephant as we keep adding weight onto here it's going to get heavier and heavier and it's hard to gauge how heavier piece is going to be from the start once you have a lot of experience with working that design all right so there's Chris get on the third gather to be about the same amount that it was before now when we're in there the heat does build up in there that's why we have this tool it's called a pipe cooler and there's a little pedal and when you pump that pedal it's pumping water out pumping it over the surface of the pipe and pulling it down now this air in Jack you're just visiting I'm here to help out okay well he's checking it out we have another stage and we keep both stages pretty well staff so if you go over to the innovation stage today I think you'll see air in there now as these pieces get larger and larger it requires more and more people to help with the piece like this we're ok doing it with three people plus the narrator but if we wanted to do something like this we'd need a much larger team when you did the sea turtle project they might have been 10 people on stage all helping out some people their job was just a torch keep the whole thing hot then they would have guys and shifts flashing the piece because it's just so heavy and so hot in front of that huge reheating furnace so it could take a lot of hands to help out but let's get ready here he's going to drop on the second drop it looks like now if you think this looks cool I want you to clap when it's done it was one of my favorite things to watch there it goes so he moves really fast because it's just ready to fall off center at any time I'm just going to cut it off and like our Hershey kids shape another thing to keep in mind there is it's so hot when he's got his glove yeah let's give my hand she was great so far as this looking really cool so just kind of smush it oh just kind of just smashing him on there but something to keep in mind there is when he's taking that 2,000 degree gob of glass his hand is just inches away from the glass and there is one great instance where you really want a glove now if we were working on a piece that was this size but it was blown there's a lot less glass there and it's not getting off so much heat so you know even pieces like fencing of a good example like that bully he may not have needed the gloves it's really up to the gaffer okay so I think our next step here is going to be to flip that axis like I was talking about before we'll take a piece that was made going from this way and then we'll put a punty on the side so that we'll be turning it this way so this were a cup we would attach it to the bottom and then and then flip it around so we could manipulate the side by rolling on this axis instead we're going to be rolling it on this axis so we're going to flip around the imagery what's up okay can I hear your ID there's your card yeah I took them down yesterday I thought we didn't need them okay I'll be right back I'm going to get a larger block you okay so we're back I got the bigger block and since the size you like I think so that cell looks like you'll work out okay so this is one of the stumps or this this block is about the size of a stump these are made out of cherry wood most of them are cherry wood he really use any kind of wood but we use cherry wood because it burns relatively slowly a good hard wood yeah you could definitely fit my head in there could maybe smooth out those big nose alright so he's using the newspaper there you can really see it start to smoke there when we see those little sparks coming off you know it's about time to add some water to that so getting those seams to close up is gonna be pretty hard because we have to get the glass back into its furnace-like state where it's so hot that it's instantly going to fuse now the center is fused so that went on really hot but getting that seam the close-up will be kind of difficult you can see he's using the torch he's letting the rest of the piece cool down but he's going to constantly torch that try and build up enough heat to get that gap to close down so our out to about the size of a bowling balls you can imagine turning a bowling balls probably about the same density as what's on the amethyst glass rod doct if you're interested there's another glassblower who's made a glass ball about the size of a bowling ball it's called my pet ball and it cruises around the country going from artists artists or place to place and when glass is really heavy and stick like that you can do whatever you want to it they drop it down two stories they dropped it down a stairwell it's been skateboarding I think it's gone surfing days on the beach stays Omaha shop all sorts of different things people will paint on it but at the end of the year they throw it into the furnace again and melt it back down so it's a nice little project all right so we're starting to see those scenes start to close up just the constant attention with the newspaper and he's pushing back and forth that scene so he'll start from one side and move the newspaper to the other side and I kind of smears that seam one way and then he'll smear it back the other way we're trying to get it to close up okay so Joe has taken one gather and you put it on the pipe warmer and that's going to keep it kind of at a happy temperature as well we don't have to worry about it cracking it will go back into the furnace and get a nice gooey layer on the outside of that cold stiff core and that cold stiff core is going to give Joe and Jeff a lot of stability when we attach this punny on such a heavy piece of grass it's going to want to fall and if I have the whole thing really soft and gooey it's just going to stretch out and fall to the floor now with this we'll have a little bit of stability because it's a really tacky and sticky layer but on the inside is the firm hard layer that's going to really really manage that well so the nice little trick for you know the next time you guys are blowing glass and making a really big piece and you want to say this really thick now the connection between this piece is going to be really key he's making kind of a dome shape and we're going to make that dome shape so that Jeff can decide how far he wants to stick on this punty if you sticks it on too far or the temperature is too hot it's going to make a complete and permanent fusion and we won't be able to get it off at the end of the show now if we do an incomplete fusion we'll have it break off before we're ready so if it's too cold or it doesn't put enough on so it's really a balancing act between the two it's a little bit of compressed air it's going to stiffen off the outside of that punny and now we're going to break some glass for you guys today we're going to break it off of Jeff's blowpipe right now Jeff is turning the pipe and Joe is just lightly following along it's kind of hard to follow the lead like that but with just a little bit of water and a tap the peach breaks free take your hand all right so we're going to start closing up the other seam it's really hard to get heat on the back end of a piece because it's the last thing to go into the reheating furnace and the steel or the stainless steel pipe is going to suck heat out of the glass so the front end is always going to be naturally hotter so we're going to flip it around and now we're going to start working the front end we'll smooth out the punty Mart or the where the pieces on the pipe before we'll smooth that out using heat and we'll also try and get that seam close up on this side and we have torches in all different sizes this one's really good for what were you doing today hot sculpting is the technique where we're sculpting the glass almost like clay but we have bigger ones and we have smaller ones the one behind Jeff I don't know if you brought that out yet but it's a big roaring very wide flame and it it's good for you know kind of giving things a general heat so if we just want to heat up like the back area of the piece we could use that and just heat it up a little bit now that one's a more direct heat so it's really focused in quite well it's using oxygen as an accelerant and creating a more intense flame now we have a bigger version of that and the head of it is about that big there's you know maybe a hundred little flames on the surface of it and it's a crazy crazy tool it's really hot I haven't seen anyone here use it yet but I've been looking at it downstairs I don't know if we talked about the inside of their heating furnace at all but if you're wondering how we have a camera on the inside there's an invention called fused silica it was made right here in Corning and fused silica is really great because it has a melting point of 4000 degrees now our glass is melting at 2,000 so there are different kinds of glass and they will not even break a sweat inside of our reheating furnace now behind that little pane of glass is another camera and it's actually outside of our heating furnace it's relatively cool back there we have a fan blowing on it as well and some other things that will help keep this camera at a working temperature so there's there's Joey's just focusing the heat towards the bottom of the peas now the whole thing looks orange right now but that's just the natural light that is giving off it's called blackbody radiation but things that don't give off late naturally are heated up so hot that they're giving off radiant lights just from their heat the atoms inside that glass are so excited that they're giving off photons in my lot of science that that's one of my favorite parts of glass now there was a little wide point on the tip where we broke off the punty rod and that's where Jeff just took that really wide part and squeezed it down with the tweezers and then pulled it off to a very small point so he took that really big wide ugly mark and made it just really tiny and will work later to press that in and it's naturally going to want to melt in because it's on the front of a piece so it'll want to turn into a ball like that all right so that seems maybe half closed up now it's definitely getting a lot lower Chris what are you doing oh okay me okay so Chris is making a tube and from what I understand this tube is going to be the top of the fishbowl so if you think about a fishbowl the inside of the piece or the inside it's got that water line and to get that water line will probably press the top of this flat and then we'll take another your separate tube of glass and just stick it on top and that'll be just the rim so the bowl of the piece and the water inside are one piece and then the rim is going to be a second piece that's just that's what he's doing right now till I take a little bit more glass and we'll put it inside the garage and save it for later now while I'm out here are there any questions this might be a good time for some questions I noticed a lot of really exciting information yeah you've got a question how's it going how long will this anneal you know that's something I don't really know a really long time yeah so I'll talk a little bit about annealing cycles I keep talking about how we're keeping the whole thing hot above that thousand degree marks it doesn't crack well to get around that issue we'll let the whole thing cool down very slowly inside one of these black ovens now we have a lot of these black ovens here and they're all set on the same schedule so our schedule is for most pieces is 8 to 8 to 12 hours and it'll hold for 2 hours before that Menem through the 8 to 12 hours it's going to slowly drop in temperature down to room temperature now for a piece like this we're talking about glasses about that thick it's really gonna have to kneel for quite a while I would say maybe 16 hours the piece that we made yesterday I made it last night that's annealing for 16 hours it's like 500 degrees right now this piece may need to be even longer than that because a lot of stress inside of that bowling ball-sized piece of glass now if you're walking through our 35 century's gallery there's this giant paperweight it's right at the end of the section where all the paper weights are it's called a mega planet as made by an artist named Josh Simpson who works out of Massachusetts and that piece it's about that big and they had to specially construct a furnace to be able to get the mega planet out of the out of the furnace it weighs one hundred seven times of glass it's like that thick it's really incredible there's a lot of detail in it you guys should all check it out but that piece was annealing for 13 months for 13 months over a year was just sitting inside one of these boxes he had no idea if it was okay or not and and you can imagine just like to keep one of these things running tossing him a pretty serious amount but the reason that that piece was made because it's our 1,000th paperweight we have the world's largest collection of paper weights and it's right here and you guys get to look at them all but that was our 1,000th and he broke the hundred pound limit and was his own record that he broke to make this paperweight so yeah it's 107 pounds of glass solid and you had to rebuild a furnace to get to get it where it is today now this piece will definitely won't need a full year to anneal but you know what might be might be a couple days left to see what Jeff wants to do there any other questions yeah Oh so where do you make pictures that's a good question I really encourage you to do it so trying to describe it there's a bridge it goes kind of above the gift shop with the Innovation Center if you walk through the Innovation Center on your right there's these fast use of these guys blowing glass he's got a big round circle and a long skinny tube there's some stairs there and if you go down the stairs you'll see our drawing area it's right outside I think it's the Frederick Carter gallery is that it's behind admissions behind admission sounds a lot easier okay yeah but you know there we have drawing supplies and you can submit your design for the make your own here at Corning Joe is not another punky okay so looks like we're going to punch it up again so we've got the one side kind of polished out you can see it's perfectly smooth perfectly spherical jeff has done a really good job about making that a really great sphere it's actually one of the hardest things to make as a glassblower you think it'd be really easy you think it'd just blow into it and be a bubble but to make a sphere is really hard because if it's a little bit off you know instantly you're like oh that looks like an egg about a ball alright so here we're going to flip it so the first punny that we made we put on to the end of the piece now we're putting on to the side and that's going to flip all the imagery in there sideways and allow us to make some fish that are actually swimming in their bowl so a little bit of water on that jac line again and we'll break it off give them another hand I'll adjust gears with experience or paying off okay so we can again we can see that punky bark it's going to be the same process pretty much we're going to get that spot pretty hot and then finish it with some tweezers pull it to a plate and let's smooth it out so anyone has any more questions feel free to jump in anytime yeah you have one is it going how do we turn the glass different colors I love that question so how we do it in the shop is we go online and when we say I want this color and there's over 300 colors to choose from and then they ship it right to our door in that format which is like frit it's little tiny granules so you can just stick it to the outside of the glass we also have color bar was a solid color so before it's been broken up and we get those colors from plays in Germany there's a lot of manufacturers but we use Reichenbach color now how do they make it there that might be more what you were asking she wanted to cover the groundwork there but how do they make that color we use metal oxides so just try and find some examples here I don't know all the color chemistry yet but this blue right here that bright blue not a white is a copper blue so they're adding copper oxide to the glass now we have to do that in a powdered form and since we don't use powdered glass here we we buy our like nuggets that are pre melted when we throw them in but if we were mixing premade or we were mixing batch the powdered ingredients we could add color into it and get beautiful colored glass now other other recipes are going to be other metal oxides green is usually an iron oxide so rough fancy name for it reds are going to be things like cadmium which is kind of toxic so we don't we definitely don't want to be mixing that here but once once these chemicals are in the glass they're relatively inert so you can drink out of lead crystal and not get blood poisoning because it's actually embedded in the the chemical structure of the glass so that's your question ji did you have a certain color in mind no okay good yeah more questions feel free to jump in as I'm talking okay so Jeff is reheating the whole piece is keeping the whole thing hot and I think he's going to start working on the sides there now Chris is over here and it looks like he's putting away the top it's ready to go okay so we've got all our pieces made now now it's pretty much just a matter of getting things smoothed out and we'll put them together now you can see he's running into a little problem there he's really having to fight gravity the pieces falling and I was falling as a flip it and that's one of the really difficult parts of making glass like this when it's off axis they're really trying to flip it back and forth push it on Center and then flip it the other way and I could almost guarantee you Jeff is barely thinking about what he's doing with his left hand his right hand is where what he's thinking about and the left hand is just I it knows what it needs to do or he knows some automatic response he sees it falling you know look I need to flip so it's going to work with both hands to make this there's no spot keep that little nub where he cut off all that glass and then he'll be able to press it back in now when we're torching keep in mind we're still going to use the heat of the reheating furnace it would be really inefficient and probably impossible to heat up that whole piece with our torches so will you put it inside there bring it out and then just heat the spot that we want to keep hot and that's going to let that part get hot and the rest of the piece is going to be cooling down because it's out in the air and then when we put it back in the hot spots getting even hotter we're building up heat there and the spots that we let cool down this is just going to warm back up to where it was we're able to direct the heat using both the torch and the reheating furnace so it's a little bit more newspaper it looks cute I press that in the newspapers one of our favorite tools because it really gives us a hands-on approach to working the glass it's almost like shaping things with the palm of your hand or like working with ceramics because you're constantly turning something so there's a really big analogy there in fact at my school I'm I go to school for glassblowing I'm the intern here and at my school if you graduate with your degree in glass it's the same department it's glass / ceramics because they're very closely related not only do we share kind of a process of very hands-on craft but we also share a lot of equipment so these annealer are very similar to the kilns that they fire pottery in we also have kilns that we can use for glass and we can melt glass inside of a kiln make flat sheets do lots of very interesting things so there's the image again and we've got all the parts in there just need to add the rim and perhaps the flat spot on the bottom to sit on so it looks like Chris is preparing yet another punty I think we've already got a flat spot on the bottom I kind of yeah yeah so it looks like there's a little flat spot on the bottom so this will sit flat on our table and maybe they're going to drop this on I'm not sure what this is oh this is like the bottom of the fish tank okay so we don't want the the gravel to be all the way to the bottom we're going to add one more relatively thin layer to the base and that's gonna that's going to let us kind of encase that color on the bottom so there it is that's a really cool move he's able to really control how much glass he's taking they're not only by how much glass he tells Chris to gather up but by by taking that mass and then he stretched it out from the top with a pair of diamond sheers so you kind of took it and grabbed it and it's kind of made a little caterpillar by pulling it up now we're going to flatten this out that Tilly is using right now is made out of the same stuff that's in your pencils it's graphite and graphite not only is it really great to read and write with but it's also a good tool for coming in contact with things that are really hot the glasses is going to ever stick to the graphite and the graphite can tolerate the temperatures very well so they kind of made a corner with the two paddles you had the graphite one kind of add an upward angle and then the wooden one was coming in from the side and as we turned the glass inside there that glass squished down into the corner and give us that nice sharp edge all right so now we've got a bottom to the piece a little bit compressed air is going to help us control the temperature keep in mind that they're ready most of the piece was at about 1500 degrees and the bottom could have been much hotter than that when it was placed on so just gonna make another punty or pontil and attach it onto the bottom now one of the most interesting things about glassblowing for me is the history of the tools and the equipment and the furnaces and all the other components that go into this our heritage as craftspeople and one of the most interesting things I was reading a book over the Rakhal library if it any question about glass you should go over there and ask because they're really helpful but I was I was wondering how blowpipes were made because we didn't always have access to tubing metal tubing is actually really hard to make because it's got that long hole they take it when it's really hot and drop it over a mandrel and then let it let it form that too very slowly that's an industrial process they didn't always have that so what they were doing we think is making ceramic blowpipes and they would melt they would melt glass onto the end while it was firing notice let's give another hand he gave a heat transfer it again this great point but the blow pipes may have been made out of ceramic we found some in the hills of Spain and if they have residue of glass on the end and they're not really near a ceramic place so we think that they were making glass with them now it's really hard to know for certain because they are ceramic and they did break but if you can imagine doing what we're doing now on the end of a ceramic blowpipe it would be really hard to do in fact probably impossible because the it's not gonna be able to endure that stress of dropping it down onto the table now our furnaces weren't always fueled with natural gas either we keep our glass molten at 2,000 degrees every day of the week every day of the year so we're using a lot of energy you got a big fruit basket feeding of the year from the energy company because they love us so much but we we didn't always have that so before this we use coal furnaces and coal let us control that temperature a little bit longer but before that they were using wood-fired furnaces and if you know how hard it is to keep your campfire burning can you imagine keeping a entire furnace of glass molten at a predictable temperature for a long enough time to make beautiful glassware and that's what they were doing in Murano in the Renaissance if you're walking through the gallery and you see all the really fine very thin goblets keep in mind they were importing wood from off the island and using it to fuel their furnaces there was a guy and that was his job was to make sure that the furnace was always running and it was always around the same temperature so that the gaffer's could uh it could make their work now the reading furnace would also be made out of out well it would also be fueled with gas now the design of the studio was built differently to accommodate that they would have a hub furnace in the center it's like a large beehive and there'd be on you know between five or maybe even ten it's hard to say if there would be a lot of different setups going around and there's all be radial right there now eventually is the the Italians realized that it was not very economical for them to keep importing wood from off the island so what they did is they decided to bring their glass production here to America and that's because there were forests everywhere so you got all the wood you need you just needs to figure out how to how to get the work back and how to make glass from the materials here on our land now it was really hard for them to make glass here because a lot of the sand that we have here isn't purified yet now you can purify the silica sand to melt into glass but it's a little bit hard to do especially if you have very crude technology you you all right so we're moving on here we've got the next step change shape a little bit we flattened out the top and that's going to be the surface of the water and Chris is over here and he's going to reheat this this bubble that he had inside of our furnace now it looks to me like that's still closed so he's going to probably want to open that up or maybe they'll just stick it on like this yeah so because of that glass is so hot we don't even have to open it up into a tube we can just stick it right on there so this will give me the top of the fishbowl so we're going to squeeze it on there remember that glass was fusing instantly and he's got to get it on Center so as he's rolling the blowpipe he's looking for any wobble or any hiccup in the shape was another tap that breaks off yeah my hand okay now that left a little hole behind it from that hole we'll be able to stretch it out into the mouth of the vessel so basically what we did is we took a little cup and we put it on top of the huge solid mass of glass but don't tell anybody that's their secret so see that hole or that opening it's the same way that would open a cup for something I keep holding up this green cup but the opening for this was really small and then we took a tool called Jack's and we opened it up by spreading them wider and lifting up with our hands so we can open this into any shape we want I think we're going to go for just a little lift like you see on the top of a fishbowl then when we're done with this piece we're going to send it back through whoever designed it so it's probably going to sit on a desk at work or something I think he's 47 so we don't always think the youngest person we love when people of all different walks of life submit things we try and pick the projects that are going to be the most fun to make for us you know trying new skills making up new techniques now you have to imagine that this is going to be the easiest pet fish take care of ever it's pretty easy to take care of a fish you feed it and then you clean the bowl every once in a while but something like this you might just have to polish it out some fingerprints here you're ready to go now that's what we're almost done we're just going to open it up I think and we'll be pretty close to finish I think our next showing here is that 11:30 so if we have to we'll move over to the other bench and we'll start that show as well 11:45 okay I think we got this one we got this in the bag so you can see he's got those tweezer like tools and he's kind of opening up with the blades in there now these are one of my favorite tools they're kind of a Swiss Army knife for glassblowers we can use these blades to open things down and that's what he's doing right now we can put them on the sides of things to cool off the sides or shape things from the side we can also use the blades to pinch and these will weld the back the strap of the jacks we can cool parts of that or press things on so they're really useful tool they're kind of our Swiss Army knife now the interesting thing about a lot of our tools is they're handmade still these are not mass-produced on an assembly line there's some guy in Japan last name is Maruko and these are marui kojak's and he can craft each pair and if you hold these in your hand you can really feel the craftsmanship the strap is a different kind of Steel than the blades so that the blades don't wear out as fast the strap is a spring steel it's been specially selected and annealed so that it's very strong and doesn't Bend it'll spring back and the other thing that's really important with Jack's is that the blades meet up just about perfectly so there's a very thin line of light that's coming through these when they're squeezed together now it's going to let us do really fine detail work and get beautiful glass if you know how to use them just just because you buy nice stacks doesn't mean that you're able to make nicer glass it's really how you're using the tool so I can see Jeff has a Nomex sleeve on site green sleeve he's wearing it's protecting his arm from the really intense heat of that huge mass of glass now earlier in the show he's wearing a glove because he needs to be able to feel the glass and how it's moving and the newspaper is going to basically be a glove for him he took that off he doesn't need it anymore now he's using the newspaper to really push in the top of that piece and create a smooth surface on the outside so it looks there was one piece of glass and we can create that illusion this is one piece of glass it's actually many many many pieces of glass have been stacked off and layered [Music] so this next step is to trim away some excess thickness getting rid of excess glass and eliminating some of that height he's using a pair of sheers called duckbill sheers again these are handmade handcrafted these are from Seattle and they're cutting edge or no they're from California Chico California and they're cutting edge sheers and the blades are curved for a very special reason there's a lot of the times we're cutting along inside of a curved surface when we use straight shears they hit at the tip first so by using curved shears we can ensure that we're cutting as we're turning and it makes things a lot easier now we also do have straight shears there's actually a pair of scissors just sitting on the bench here someone was using these but these are these shears are designed a little bit differently there designs that our hand is really far back from the glass and the blades don't need to be as sharp as they would be to cut paper or something but then we want them to be strong and durable instead all right so we're focusing heat up on the top this piece is almost done and we're going to open it up just give it a little bit of a flare and it'll make any last changes one of the really neat things that is happening with a really large solid piece of glass like this is it creates a lens effect so as you're looking through it you're seeing things magnified and shrunk down and it's really neat it would be really cool for whoever gets to keep it there's that fold I was talking about he was going to just shape that flare it out a little bit we're using a wooden paddle to press down and create a flat opening now Joe's over here he's getting into a what I call the Iron Man suit or the tin can and it's a it's actually not made of tin it's got a foil on the outside and that's going to reflect the heat off of him so especially in a really large piece if you're carrying like that piece you're carrying that to the annealer you want that suit on so that you can hold it close to you without burning your chest so we also have a helmet and that's really helpful for when you have to put your head inside of a 900 degree oven I know we've all been taking things out like a pizza out of the oven or cookies or something and you open up the oven door and you get hit in the face well this is about three times hotter than that so we have a face shields that we're wear for smaller pieces but something big and have you liked this we'll want that full protection so he's going to wait a little bit hot in there and a little bit weird it's hard to see out so he's going to wait to put that on we're going to torch that punky connection and just make sure that it's it's nice and soft and that is going to break off really cleanly when we're ready I'm also going to take a few broad general heat scald flashes to make sure that the temperature is equalized across the entire piece and we'll just work it slowly when you spend this long on a piece you always want to take your time taking off the blowpipe you never want to rush it and if it looks like it doesn't want to come off yet but don't take it off I've broken a lot of pieces trying to rush things like that okay so here's the moment of truth here's a little test that punty out it's going to trip a little bit of water on there give it a tap and it breaks free give them a hand that's fantastic he'll polish off where the punty broke with a little bit of that torch again and he's just going to round it out now Jo's wearing Kevlar amiss but he's started to feel that heat you can seem kind of shifting her around he's ready to get it in the ND filter and there it is so we'll take that out from well maybe tomorrow I don't really know how long that's going to need to anneal for the last Jeff after the show give them one more hand close Jeff Macke jo fell zoning Chris Rochelle dumped in the middle and Erin's back was here for emotional support [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Corning Museum of Glass

Views: 93,866

Keywords: Corning Museum of Glass, glass, glassmaking, glassblowing, You Design It; We Make It, YDI, glass fish, glass sculpture

Id: 7re4K-vOwjI

Length: 121min 35sec (7295 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 01 2017