Color & Gather 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. Fern’s going to get her piece hot. We’re going to drop this on and we’re going to use the diamond sheers. Now, a lot of people have trouble using the diamond sheers at first, because they hold them the wrong way. They try to hold them like a pair of scissors. They put their hands in here and they go like that. You can’t really of diamond sheers if you hold them like that. You want to hold them like that; that’s how you hold diamond sheers. Fern says we’ll be ready in 5 seconds. I’ve got the diamond sheers ready; I’ve my post nice and cold. She brings it out, I give it a little shake, and put the glass on. Hold please, and cut it off. Now, we put a nice piece glue glass on it. I sort of mash it so that it’s even. Now, it’s not perfectly even yet, but that’s okay. We’ll take care of that in a second. To even the piece out, what I’m going to do is heat up just the color. Of course, you can’t just heat part of the glass in the glory hole. You’re always going to heat the whole thing, but I’m trying to concentrate the heat on the bottom of the piece where the color is, so I’m not going in very fat. In other words, I’m not heating in this far, I’m just heating just in enough so that color takes the majority of the heat. The other thing that’s helping me is that that post that I put the color over is very cold and it’s very thick, so it’s got a long way to go before it softens up. Hopefully, the color, when I come out will be nice and soft, and I can move the color around, but the post will be nice and solid and will provide a base upon which I can distribute that color. Okay, so as I see the colors start to move, I can come out of the glory hole. Here we go. What I’m trying to do is get the color to fall evenly, and then I can push it on using the marver. I push it back, and then I redistribute the glass. Now, because of the way I blow out my second and third gathers, I like to have more glass on the bottom, because my bubbles tend to blow out down through the piece. Other glass blowers use different techniques. We use a more even approach to distributing color, but in my case, I like to push a lot of color down on the bottom of the piece. That keeps the piece evenly colored when it’s all done. This is a matter of style depending on how you blow out the piece. If you tend to blow out a very thick piece evenly and you have the walls and the bottom elongate at the same rate, you would want to distribute the color evenly. My technique, I tend to blow out the walls very slightly, and I tend to blow out the bottom a lot. Therefore, I need to put more color down at the bottom of the piece in order for that color to be relatively distributed at the end. So, that’s what I’m doing right now; I’m distributing that color based on the way that my next 2 gathers are going to distribute the glass."