Without Fire, It's Just Pottery
Nathan Michaels - April 21, 2019, 6 p.m.
tags: blown pint-glass
There was some molding going on today. It occasionally made for interesting stuff to look at.
Don't mind us, we're just setting fire to this wooden frame here.
We worked on making more glasses. This time we skipped the molds. Instead, we tried to shape things into drinking-glass-form by hand. The furnace was charged recently, so it was a bit bubbly.
Sometimes, to make the bubble in the glass longer, we'd swing it out.
Other shaping was largely done with jacks.
Shaping the inside of a piece with jacks is particularly amusing because the beeswax likes to catch fire.
While we were thinning out the lip of one piece, the opening got a little too small. So to open it back up, Lucas stuck the jacks inside it. But since glass is stretchy, it just stretched a piece of glass into the inside of the piece. This made a cool-looking filament thing, which we ended up working with until it became a vase. You can kind of see the filament here:
This was after it fell down and touched the side, probably due to some insufficient turning and excessive heating.
