Glass Blowing: Techniques & Furnaces

Video Transcript

"Hi I’m Anna from Annawillowglassdesign.30art.com and I would like to show you some of the equipment we use in every single glass blowing studios all around the world. This first piece is the most important piece of equipment. It’s called the furnace and if you open it up and look inside, it’s got a big pot of melting glass sitting inside of it and all that glass is about 2,000 degrees. It’s all clear and to it we add color. These are some of the kinds of color that we use. This is brit; some of them are large chips, some of them are powder and we put them onto the blow pipes which are over here in the pipe warmer. This pipe warmer basically warms up the metal of pipes so that the glass from the furnace will stick to it and then we can put the color on from there. Once we put the color onto the glass, we need to melt it in and we use this tool and this is called the glory hole because of the golden glowing color inside of it and that word came from the gold miner’s during the Gold Rush in California. Whenever they would find gold, they would say Eureka glory hole so that is why we call this the glory hole. "