Cousins and glass

After breakfast and the bus ride we head to the Hot shop for our last session.  We are making a glass today. Here is Caroline rolling her glass, getting it nice and round. And here is Margaret opening up the mouth of her glass while Chris keeps it rolling.  Here we are at the end of our last Hot Shop Class.  After we put our glasses in a kiln to cool, it is off to Flame Shop.  We make more beads, this time adding backing soda to get a bubble effect.   Apparently none of us got a photo of one with bubbles. However here are some beads I made in earlier sessions. As you can see,  they are not all round.  I did experiment with one square bead, but the rest were supposed to be round.  Our final session in Kiln was to be sand blasting.  We had all brought wine bottles the first day and the instructors melted them down. Now we were...

As usual Barb and Margaret are up before me, but at least I beat Caroline to breakfast.  After breakfast it is on the bus and off to CMOG.  We start the morning with a tour of the Frederick Carder Steuben Gallery led by Jenny.  Carder was the creative force behind the Steuben Glass Co.  It was a short, but interesting tour. Jenny pointing something out, can't remember what Cameo glass Not sure of the title, but it is a beautiful piece Then it was off to class.  Today we are making a bowl in the Hot Shop, more beads in the Flame Shop and more flat work in Kiln class.   Barb and I both choose to make picture frames for our piece in Kiln.  I have a hard time coming up with ideas. Luckily Margaret is more creative and gives me a helping hand.  Caroline cutting some pieces of glass to add to her project.  We have lots of pieces of glass to make our patterns from in all shapes, sizes and...

We have the same schedule every morning so after breakfast we are on the bus to the Studio.  Today we are having a demonstration of some more complex items that can be made in the Hot Shop.  Seats have been set up for all 24 of us in the Hot Shop and Christa is going to make a couple of items with help from Chris and Lyman.   The first item she is going to make is a compote.  Here they are adding a stripe to the form she has blown    The piece came out very nice.     Then she was going to make a large vase.     She got pretty far along.     Not long after this step, she was re-heating the piece in the oven and when she was taking it out she tapped it against the hood above the stove and the piece broke and fell to the ground in lots o’pieces.  There was very little response from her or the guys.  We thought this was strange and asked why.  Christa said you c...

In the literature we were provided by Road Scholar was our schedule for the week.  This, our first morning, officially started at 7:45 with breakfast in the Dining Room at the Thomas Watson (yes, the IBM guy) Conference Center in Painted Post, NY.  Breakfast was pretty good, several choices of hot or cold items.  After breakfast a bus was provided at 8:30 to take us to our class.  Our driver for the week was the local school bus driver Jessie.  It was about a 15 minute drive to the Corning Museum of Glass in downtown Corning, NY.  Corning is an old fashioned company town.  Almost everything revolves around Corning Glass.   This is our home for the next four days.  The Corning Museum of Glass Studio. We are greeted by the Special Projects Manager, Stephen Brucker who gives us an overview of what we will be learning and introduces us to our instructors.  We learn that every day we will have a 90 ...

  Barb drove from Minneapolis, the rest of us flew to Detroit, changed planes and flew on to Elmira where Barb picked us up.   She had rented an Air BnB house for us.  It was a 3 story house, built in 1895 and we had the entire 3rd story to our ourselves.  After a good night’s sleep (or at least a decent night’s sleep) we older folks got up and visited for a while.  Eventually Margaret went to take a shower.  She came out after a bit and said the water never got warm, in fact she got in and out quickly because the water was too cool.  I thought maybe if I ran the water longer, it would get hot.  Alas it did not, so I took a washcloth bath.  Barb notified the landlords who live on the 1st floor.  It turned out they had a broken pipe in the basement.  A plumber was called and by the time we left, the pipe was repaired. The owners were very apologetic and gave us a bag of goodies when we left.  We had brunch in downtown Cornin...

This past March when visiting my cousin Barbara I was admiring some glass pieces she had in her condo.  She said she had made them in a Road Scholar course on blowing glass.  She said it was fun and she sort of wanted to do it again.  I said it sounded interesting and that if she did go again to let me know as I might be interested in going too.  Eventually Barbara, her sister Margaret and their niece Caroline and I signed up for the course.  This is an account of our adventure at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning New York in November of 2019.