Bubble Ways Workshop with Dan Mirer

I had the opportunity this weekend to take a workshop with Dan Mirer, who works out of the Corning Glass workshop in Corning, NY. While Dan has been blowing glass for a long time, he is now fairly widely know for his work with the Swedish overlay technique to capture very well-defined patterns of bubbles in pieces (as in the following image).

Besides being a talented glass blower and teacher, Dan is a great guy to work with. He has an almost boundless willingness to share his techniques and expertise, and he is a patient teacher.
Without getting into the technical aspects of the Swedish overlay, I like this technique because it is a useful way both to get a workable color to the outside of a vessel form and to capture bubbles as decorative elements in very precise patterns on a piece.

The photo above clearly shows the intricate bubble pattern on this side of the bowl Dan is making.

Update to Fritz Driesbach Workshop

I have continued to work with carving since the Fritz Driesbach workshop.  While the method is more time consuming than just applying color in the hot shop, you can get much more detailed and controlled patterning.

The piece in the photo above is one of the first I made after the workshop.  I have several more carved ‘cups’ in the final stages of carving, including the one below.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to pick these up in the hot shop and work them into final pieces in the next few weeks.

Venetian Cane Workshop with Scott Benefield at TMA

Back in August I took a four-day workshop with Scott Benefield at the Toledo Museum of Art. While Scott’s use of cane and murrini is fairly contemporary, he has an extensive knowledge of historical glass and traditional venetian cane technique. There are plenty of YouTube videos of people pulling cane and doing cane roll-ups, but seeing it done doesn’t begin to prepare you for doing it yourself. I had done small cane pulls before, probably in the five to six foot range, but we immediately jumped into pulling cane fifteen to twenty feet in length. The goal is to create cane about a pencil’s width in diameter, but you’re starting with a log of molten glass about three or four inches in diameter and probably three times as long as that. This is a challenge because you have to keep your glass balanced with each new gather of hot glass and then you have to get the heat profile correct. Imagine having several pounds of hot floppy glass on the end of a punty and having to keep it on balance while you heat it up. When you finally get the heat right, you have to drop the end of your mass of glass onto a post that the person helping you has set up. It’s easy to miss, then you end up with a big mass of molten glass on the floor. (No, glass blowers don’t wear sandals.) Even once you start the pull, it takes experience to pull it out. If you go too quickly, the glass might run away from you and you end up with a lot of very thin cane in the middle and probably a lot of glass left on the punty and the post. If you go too slow, then your cane is too thick and it’s likely to break apart as it cools.

Once you have your cane, the next challenge is to heat it up on a pastorale and then roll it up onto a blow pipe with a properly sized collar.  As the cane heats, it begins to fuse together and then you can roll it up on your blow pipe into a long open tube.  You can then close down the open end and then you have created a bubble that you can either blow up as is, or gather over.  There are several challenges in this, but if you do it right you can end up with truly amazing pieces.  Lino, the grand master of glass blowing, incorporates cane into most of his blown works, mixing in different colors and patterns.

After the workshop, I starting doing cane work with the help of some friends.  It’s certainly more time consuming than just working with powders and frits, but it’s also, for me anyway, much more rewarding.