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View from the North 40: A video menagerie of glassworks: My obsession

I didn’t expect to become obsessed with glass-making videos, yet here I am spending several hours a week watching Youtube videos of the folks at the Corning Museum of Glass make the most beautiful glassworks.

Just this morning I watched one of their glass artists, called gaffers, and his team of three or four students make one and a half elaborate blue-glass goblets in one hour and 14 minutes — like it was nothing.

They took metal rods, stuck them in a vat of molten glass, and through a cooperative ritual-slash-dance of spinning the metal, blowing air into the glass and stretching, pinching, welding, reheating and cooling made the elaborately ornamented blue goblets.

The half of a goblet? No worries, they just took a break for a bit of lunch then would be back to the ovens. It was like, Oh yeah, we usually get up and perform magic-slash-alchemy before lunch every day. Don’t you?

Right. Yeah.

Their ovens are heated to 2,000 degrees, which is like the temperature of a small red sun — and nobody sweats or falls onto the floor gasping for water or throws their hot tools into a heap and says “Dirty-word this, I’m going to go sit in front of the air conditioner.”

The glass has to stay above 1,000 degrees while they do things like make a perfect 10-inch melty-glass bubble by blowing into a blob of glass through an attached pipe that they spin, constantly. Then they roll the glass bubble in colored glass chips, sling the whole works into an oven a few times to melt everything together. In the end, they pop a hole in the end of the perfect bubble with a pair of giant tweezers which they then use to flatten the popped bubble — like a flower blooming — into a 20-inch cake plate.

It’s basically a kaleidoscope in 3-D.

They judge the perfect temperature for all this work by the look and feel of the glass.

What? I roasted a turkey once and it took two thermometers and that red pop-up thingy to get it dry on the outside and under-cooked on the inside. Whatever.

Who am I kidding, I can’t fry eggs the same way twice or figure out how to get the toaster setting right between whole-wheat bread, English muffins and cinnamon-raisin bread. (How is it that they are all bread products and none of them cook the same?)

They wield and shape glass that’s hot enough to be gooey, using some steel rods and, like, barbecue tongs. I can’t keep a spatula from flipping onto the floor, and if I had a dollar for every time I splattered food across the kitchen, I’d have a lot more horses — plus a hired hand to burn supper for me.

To be fair, though, I’ve watched these masters of molten glass drop a blob of glass onto the floor and they just have to dab it up with a hot poker. For real, the glass just pops off the floor. Apparently the hot glass won’t stick to cold materials. If only that were true of spaghetti sauce.

I know you’re looking for a point to this column, and normally I’m all about leaving you with some kind of conclusion that says we have a wrap on this idea, but today, I gotta cut this off and go. While I’ve been typing, this other gaffer started making a tiny, delicate perfume bottle out of dabs of molten glass made from what looks like pencil-thin clear glass tubes, but what turns out to be all the colors of butterflies once she adds heat.

I don’t understand this new process that smacks of sorcery-slash-alchemy, but the little bottle is so beautiful even I want one to put perfume in it and use that elegant dabber to delicately apply my favorite perfume. I just have to find out if I can get my perfume of choice — Lady Speed Stick antiperspirant Shower Fresh scent — in a liquid form.

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Maybe alchemy could help at https://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.

 

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