Glass Ornament Workshop!

As much as I would have loved to take a workshop with Sara's internship supervisor, the timing simply did not work to our advantage. That did not stop me from my dream of learning the basics of glassblowing though! I researched some other places that offered workshops and came across Chicago Hot Glass Studio. They had a glass ornament class and I had to sign up. What a great idea so close to the holidays.
I walked in to this inconspicuous studio in a very industrial neighborhood and was instantly amazed. The space was HUGE! Very simply set up though, everything seemed quite straight forward. Things were lined up nicely and looked easy to navigate.

To my surprise, we were not working with any of the kilns. My teacher took us over to a table with a bunch of individual torches attached to the bottom and this was where our class would take place. Also, we were not using typical pipes to blow the glass...there were very convenient little bubbles of glass attached to a glass straw that we had to fill with colored glass pieces and there ya go: instant ornament! 

All we had to do was heat up the bubble at the torch until it got red hot and the color melted into the walls of the bubble and then we took the bubble off the fire and put it perpendicular to the floor and blew through the straw and the glass expanded and hardened. The whole process took about 5 minutes to make one ornament. Not as easy as it sounds though! There is a strict blowing to twirling ratio as the glass expands that is actually pretty difficult to perfect. This is also just one 30 minute workshop...I don't think my teacher expected us to be making excellent ornaments. It was definitely fun though!

This is where we had to put the ornaments still attached to the straw so they could cool down. 

Success! 3 of those 5 actually got made into ornaments....3/5 success!