The idea of taking sand and melting it into a clear liquid, and then shaving it while it's 2000 degrees is a pretty wild concept.

It's fascinating to me to see something that I may intellectually understand how they do it, how they put it together.

But I could never in the world pull it off myself.

And I think a lot of people have that experience.

You can't be out in nature and just see the seasons evolving without getting ideas in which glassblowing, what you're trying to do is interpret that, take what you see in nature and put it in a piece of glass, and there, you know, the steps it takes to get there is the exciting part about it.

Before I got into glassblowing, I wanted to be a painter and, went to college to study painting primarily.

And that's why I took the glassblowing course and just fell in love with it.

But my love of colors is what really got me into painting.

And I tried to transfer that love of color into the glassblowing field.

And it's very similar.

I mean, so basically what I'm trying to do is to paint in an impressionistic way and using 2000 degree molten sand rather than paint.

I'm setting up my color palette the same way a painter would set up, his colors to get ready to paint a picture.

The glassblowing I'm really blowing or painting with molten glass, which begins as sand, but the colors are laid on in a certain order to get the effect that I'm going for.

Developing a new idea takes a long time, because you have to experiment a lot with the colors.

And sometimes the colors don't want to be together, and the piece will crack.

That's, incompatibility is a big problem that has to be gotten around.

If you're going to successfully make a piece of glass.

In order to, make a form on a piece of glass, even something as simple as a round bubble, the first thing you do is preheat your blowpipe so that you can actually, the court glass will stick to the end of the pipe.

Then you take a gather the clear glass on the end of the blowpipe, shape it into a uniform shape, whether it be totally round or egg shaped.

Then you begin blowing your bubble.

As you're spinning to keep it on center because it is a moving mass, you blow gently and so you get a uniform thinness on the bubble and it gets to cool.

You have to go back and reheat into the glory hole.

Then you go back to the bench and you shape again.

Blow a little bit more, go back and reheat, come back to the bench using the steel jacks to cut the neckline down, and you go back and forth between the glory hole and the bench, shaping and blowing as long as necessary to get the form You want.

My forearms are a little tight now.

Glassblowing is probably one of the most physically demanding crafts that you have ever do.

Once you start the piece, you can't take a break.

You have to go until it's finished.

That's why there are so many blowing teams, especially the guys who are trying to do the large pieces.

Just not possible for one person to physically pull it off.

Even a piece like this, which should be considered for me large.

But just enough for one person.

Much more than that.

And I would have to have some resistance.

Once you achieve that form, then you have to cool it down slowly.

So if you're going to do an open vessel, you have to transfer that bubble to a solid putty.

And transfer it from the blowpipe, reheats the top of the bubble and open it into a bowl or whatever form you want.

Right now, the gather I just took out of the furnace and right at 2000 degrees.

And it's the heat that actually allows me to use a newspaper without getting burned.

It's so hot.

It creates steam with the wet paper and immediately carries it away from the pan.

Then you have to tap it off.

And put it into a annealing oven which runs at 925 to 950 and cool it down no faster than 100 degrees per hour.

After you've done that, then you've completed your piece of glass.

All right.

That was a good one fought me a little bit, but I got it back under control.

That's the sign of a true craftsman, I think, is how many you can save, not how well you can pull them off from beginning.

The idea of taking sand and soda and chemicals and cooking it up in some sort of, exotic recipe, but very precise and coming up with something so pure and beautiful as molten.

And then, crystallized glass is just a notion that, has fascinated all of us over centuries and continues to and I think that sort of freedom, has a great deal to do with the really spectacular, and revolutionary forms.

You see, contemporary glass workers making.

You got to bring them down very slowly, especially a thick one like this.

And I really, really like what's happening here.

I did, did a great job, I think.

I really think I did.

So I'm happy with the results on this one.

It won't last long for sure.

Let's see what else we have in there.

Ready?

Ready.

All right.

This is part of the rain Forest series here.

The shape didn't come out the way I wanted it to.

The design is beautiful.

I was going over a plastic form.

The piece didn't want to be classic, so it's more contemporary.

And today I'm going to make a lid to put on it.

And that'll be a beautiful piece.

Glass, if it were, a person would be, Well, I think an animal, perhaps a chameleon or something like that.

The thing about glass is it opens itself up to any suggestion.

It's, perhaps you could even say it's like a child in the sense that you lead it.

You can.

You can lead it so far in one direction or another, and it will let you know when it's gone far enough.

That direction.

So you can coax glass, you can, make friends with it.

You can't, you can't make it angry.

You can make the glass gods angry.

And you might as well turn off the furnace and quit for the day.

Because it truly, truly is the type of thing that, you have to communicate with it, and you have to be gentle with it.

You have to be patient with it.

You can't get angry at it.

I mean, it, It's just there for you to work with if you treat it nicely.

You're really an engineer and an inventor and, a designer and all these other things, rolled into the process of working with glass in addition to being an artist.

Just to master the technical, aspects of it.

I think it's a huge achievement and a wonderful challenge.

So far, so good.

Well, we'll see when you do big ones like this, I can, I can change on you real fast.

They're trying to move.

Keep it hot, keep it on center and to.

And, No, no, if you got a while ago when it was getting all out of form and it dropped, I mean, without getting off center, and they had to correct quickly.

They're fighting time.

But I still have my brushes and my drawing pencils and drawing pads, and I'll never get rid of them, because one of these days I'm going to be too old and tired to blow glass.

And I don't think the creative spirit will ever die in me until I die.

And you know, since I was a child, I wanted to be an artist and right now I happen to be a glassblower.

Who knows what I'll be 20 years from now.

I didn't think that was going to make it, but it's going to be a good piece.

You know what?

I think I'm done for the day.

There's been a good session.

Hey, mister, how did you get the flowers in the glass?

That's probably the most frequent question we get is how do we put the flowers inside the vessel?

The vessel is blown at 2000 degrees.

But first we have to make the flowers before we can include them into the gathers.

To make the flowers, we start with solid bars of color.

Then we shape them into the individual petals.

Then we have to cut them on the bandsaw and arrange them into a floral form.

It's a three stage process.

It's spread out over three days.

Once we have the large flower, we can stretch it down into a skein which represents the smaller flowers.

Then we take the smaller flowers, spread them over a hot plate so that they won't break when you pick them up on the hot vessel.

Then we take our first bubble of glass, add the background colors, then another layer of clear over that, and then we roll across the pre-heated flowers and melt those into the surface.

After that, smooth out modulus.

And then we can go back into the tank, do our final gather of clear over that, and then blow the vessel and that's how the flowers are inserted into the form.