Zatera Ul

We went to the Renaissance Festival last weekend. For me, the best part was seeing glassblowing and lampworking (using a torch to heat and work glass) demonstrations. A couple years ago, I took a glass bead-making class–basically lampworking on a smaller scale. I haven’t practiced it much since, for lack of a suitable work space (living in apartments), but now we have a garage. Even better, I know of a glass supplier nearby.

The glassblower had 27 years of experience, and he was really good. It was interesting to see how it differed from bead-making. He had the advantage of a very large, hot furnace, which heated the glass fairly quickly and evenly. Also, he was working with larger masses of glass, which stayed hot longer, so he could do more in between heatings. In beadmaking, the bead is in or near the flame almost continuously, to keep it from cooling too much or too unevenly. He had a kiln for annealing the finished piece (a vase); this makes the glass stronger and less likely to crack. I don’t have a kiln, so I can only make smaller beads; larger ones will crack as they cool.

One step in the vase shaping process was to smooth and shape the form by hand–remember that the glass is very hot, roughly one thousand degrees. He used a thick pad of wet newspaper to shield his hand. The water in the newspaper makes a layer of steam against the glass. I had read about it, but never seen it. It was very cool.