Hi! I’m Todd Hansen. Today we’re here at the Art of Fire-Contemporary Glass Blowing Studio. I’m going to show you how to blow glass. First, we’re going to learn how to gather glass on a blowing iron.
So here we’ve to get heated blow pipe, the end of the iron is nice and glowing orange. Remember, hot glass won't stick to the cold surface so we always preheat the iron before we go in. Let’s get our first gather of clear glass. We’re just going to reach over the ledge of the furnace. Just let my reflection of the iron make contact with the surface of the glass and then I’m slowly turning two times around should be good. Bring your iron back to level, come on out and now we’ve got our first gather of clear glass on the iron. You will notice that I continually turn the iron. If I stop, glass wants to sag right down to the floor. This is like having honey on the tip of a butter knife if you want to keep that glass centered, so keep it turning that will keep the glass on the iron. Let's take it to the marver, cool a little bit then we’ll do the blowing cap. The marving plate placed I’m using is just a sheet of steel, it just going to roll across. What you want to get is something about almost two times longer than it is wide as far as moving that first gather glass, cool the sides, then cool the tip just a bit.
Now we’ll do a quick blowing cap, trapping the air inside the iron with my fingertip. We should see that bubble just expand nicely, evenly into that gathered clear glass. When you get the bubble of size you want, just take your finger off the end that will stop that bubble from growing right away. And one more time we’ll roll across the marver just to cool the glass, set the sides a little bit, and get set for our second gather of clear glass over this. I’m going to try and layer my next gather just slightly below the line that I have with the first gather.
This moil again is the point that is going to be supporting this whole body of glass. We want to make sure that is nice and stable and we’ll keep a grip on that. Here we go. Again, I just look for my reflection, I bury that bubble in the glass, two-four rotations and now we’ve got our second gather of clear glass. That is how we gather glass on a blowing iron. Next, we are going to learn how to size the piece up.
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