Getting Rocks Ready for Glassblowing

"Hi! I’m Jim McKelvey with Third Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis. You can check us out on the web at www.stlglass.com. Today, we’re going to learn about glassblowing for expertvillage.com. Well, after we’ve made our first gather and blown it out a little bit, we’re probably going to want to put some more glass on there. We want to center that glass as soon as it comes out of the furnace. There are a couple of ways to do this. We can do it on the marver, but that’s sort of tricky. We can also use a carbon pad or a wet newspaper will work, but what I’m going to use today are blocks. If you’re studio has blocks, this is probably the easiest device to center the glass. Now, the thing about the block is that you’ve probably got different size blocks for different size gathers, and it can be sort of difficult to find the right block at the right moment right after you’ve gathered. What I like to do is I like to take the block that I think I’m going to need. I think that’s about the right size. I put that on the bench ready to go. Then I take the next larger size block and I put that right here on the bucket so it’s ready. That’s just in case I get too much glass out on that gather. I can quickly grab this block without having to dig around for it. So, I’ve got my block ready, my first gather is cooled off: let’s get that second gather of glass."