8th Grade Field Trip to Glassblowing Studio!

This morning my 8th grade art class went on a field trip to Corradetti Glassblowing Studio located nearby in Clipper Mill, as an extension of their study of warm glass in art class. We got an overview of the process of working with hot glass and Anthony Corradetti showed us around his studio and explained how he created a lot of the work:

Each student got the chance to work with the assistant, Emma, to create a glass flower of their own by crimping, pulling and twisting the molten glass. Here are the steps we followed to create our work...

Blow pipes are twirled in the molten glass (2100 degrees) to "gather" the glass on the pipe, much like using a wooden stick to gather honey. Glass is gathered three times to create a flower:

The pipe is cooled a little with water so that it is more comfortable to touch (the rod must be held and constantly rotated to keep the glass from dripping off):

The glass is pressed into colored glass frit and melted- I don't have a pic of that! Next, students use a crimping tool to create a pattern on the "petals" of their flower (they are rotating the pipe at all times):

The glass is reheated and students used larger tweezers to pull the petals outward (some look more like sea creatures than flowers- very cool!):

Using the tweezers, we stretch the whole piece about a foot and twist the "stem" however we choose:

The assistant detaches the flower from the pipe and torches the end to round it out:

The pieces are put into an annealing oven... Annealing is the very slow process of cooling the glass down from about 900 degrees to room temperature to prevent cracking and breaking. You may notice that the pieces are not very colorful. When the colored glass frit is hot, it looks brown, but it will be bright and beautiful when cool:

Here are some of the kids working:

After making our pieces, we watched Anthony Corradetti demonstrate the glassblowing process several times to create different forms. It was so interesting and the students had a blast!