December Ornaments

The holiday season is upon us and I've spent the past couple of weekends making ornaments. While not that hard to make they are still a bit challenging if you are still starting out. At their most basic, Ornaments are just a bubble with the opening sealed to make the hook. For me the bubble deffinitely was easy to handle. The hooks I'm sure you can see the hooks proved hard to make.

To form them you dab a blob of fresh glass ontop stretching out thin. Once its long and thing enough you cut it off and use your tweezers to cool, shape and attach it into a eye. Its a coordinated effort between the Gaffer and their assistant. The assistant brings the hot gather of glass and presses it to the top of the ornament. The gaffer then stretches the glass into a thread with their diamond shears, then uses tweezers to finish it. Thermal dynamics kicks in here, large chunks of glass tend to retain heat well, and will move around. Conversely thin glass tends tends to heat up very quickly and can actually be much more challenging to work with. Once warm thin glass will move quite quickly, but you only have a short amount of time before it gets cold enough to manipulate.

I also managed to make a few cups that I am particularly proud of. Getting thin walls while maintaing a thick bottom is the key to making good cups. There is very little at this point that I could explain about these. The Kent State University Glass program has a really good YouTube video explaining one of the ways to go about this. The artist (Davin Ebanks) also has their own YouTube channel as well that has been a great wealth of learning. Davin usually does two versions of the videos, one where he walks you through the process of what he is making, and ASMR version that is great if you just want to watch an artist work. As someone that is still learning I especially like that he leaves in his screw ups. Sometimes its useful to learn from someone elses mistakes, especially when their are knowledgable enough to walk you through what they did wrong.

It's finally the rainy season hear in The Bay, and sadly that means many weekends for a few months will probably be rainy. Thankfully my day job gives us the last week off for the holidays. So hopefully the weather will cooperate and I get my propane tanks refilled so I can get back out there making more stuff.