Blown Away!

If you've been reading this blog since before the pandemic, you probably know that Dear Husband and I have a fondness for art glass. Pittsburgh has been home to the Pittsburgh Glass Center since 2001, but it got famous thanks to the Netflix competition called Blown Away. They hold classes and (free!) exhibitions as well as train professional artists. DH and I had stopped by the gallery just down the street from the children's hospital a few times, but I very much wanted to take a class to make my own, squat, blown glass pumpkin with a curly-que stem. I was able to schedule a group session in between stints on service in the hospital in the fall, but forgetting our vaccination cards and a flat tire put the kibosh on that. So I rescheduled for a private lesson with another couple in January, when work got a little quieter. We pretty much had the shop to ourselves, our teacher was amazing, and we had FUN making two pumpkins each. One pumpkin she blew and we shaped, and the other we blew and she shaped. I like this photo because it makes it look like I have pink hair.

One of our favorite parts was definitely picking colors to mix and match. After Christa picked up a blob of molten glass from the central repository and cooled down the pole, we dabbed it in the crushed fret to add color.

You have to heat the glass in a glory hole in between steps so it doesn't cool off too much, then it gets blown into a mold to create ridges. There was a larger mold for the pumpkins and a smaller mold for the stems.

Then the glass is blown into--if you push too much or too fast, it makes a weak bleb off the bottom that, however, can be fixed.

Meanwhile, the neck of the pumpkin is narrowed with an enormous pair of tweezers.

After that, you knock the pumpkin off the stick with a bat (it was literally one of those mini Louisville Sluggers). Our other favorite part of the process was watching the instructor put on the twisty stems: so satisfying!

 Tada!

Colors: orange with lime green stem; supposed to be teal but came out green, with green stem; purple with black stem; medium blue with light yellow stem (could have been darker)

These ones are golden with a black stem;  white and tan;  blue and white with a red stem; and mottled black with a golden stem.