11/4 CMOG

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 minute session in each of the 3 disciplines that make up our program.  They are Hot Shop which is Glass Blowing, Flame Working which for us is making beads and Kiln Work which is includes making items with glass sheets and pieces and fusing them together in a kiln and doing a little sand blasting.  Almost all of the employees of the Studio seemed to be glass artists.  Our instructors are Lyman and Chris in Hot Shop, Christa and Allison in Flame shop and Erica and Eric in Kiln Work.  

There are 24 of us in the group and we are divided into 3 groups of 8 so each group starts in a different area and rotates to the next one as the day goes by.  We four are in Group 1 and we start in Hot Shop.

This will be our first project in Hot Shop.  We all meet the age requirement.   Ours will not have this many colors.  We can choose one color for the whole thing or one color for the flower and one for the stem. 

Below is Margaret with her “gather” of glass, with instructor Lyman.

And here she is rolling her glass in the shards of colored glass she has chosen for her flower. 

Caroline pulling out the edges of the flower. 

I have just made a decision for the sake of not boring my readers with too much info.  I’m only going to include pictures of one area per day, although there are some videos I may include on a daily basis.  So today it was Hot Shop.  The processes in each area are similar each day.

After Hot Shop we move on to Flame Shop where we start to learn to make beads with Christa and Allison.  It is harder than it sounds.  Getting your bead round takes a lot of practice.  

Then it is off to lunch.  We have a voucher for the CMOG cafeteria.  They have a lot of options and the food is ok most days and pretty good others.  

After lunch it’s on to Kiln Work with Erica and Eric.  Here we get 4 squares of 4” x 4” clear glass which we can add chips of colored glass to make sun catchers or coasters or just decorations.  The squares are then put in the kiln and the chips are fused to the square.  

After the last class we got a tour of a portion of the Corning Museum of Glass with a guide. Our guide is Jenny who has lived in Corning for 43 years, knows everyone, has a passion for glass and was an actress for a while early in life.  She was very knowledgeable and full of energy.  Unfortunately most of us were pooped and just wanted to take the bus back to the Watson Center.  We finally did depart, had supper and most of us went to bed early.