11/7 Day 4 Last Day of Classes

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 going to sand blast some patterns into them. 

The flat wine bottles are meant to be cheese serving platters, hence the words Caroline is blasting into hers.  The tape protects the parts that you don’t want etched by the sand.

We could also sandblast any piece of glass we wanted so Margaret went out and bought something to etch at lunch.  Here she is working on it. 

And here is the result, a water bowl for her dogs.  

After our last class there was to be a drawing for the pieces that the instructors had been making as examples for us.  

When your name was called you went up and chose from what was left of this lot.  I ended up with the smaller orange bowl.  If you were driving home you picked up all of your glass from the week and took it with you.  Most of the rest of us had our glass shipped as we didn’t want to chance getting it broken on the plane.  Caroline however gave the airplane a try with hers and says it got home just fine. 

After the drawing we got on the bus and once more Jenny gave us a tour, this time of downtown.  It was quite interesting, lot of history here. After the tour, the bus took us to “Bottles and Corks” the local wine shop where we got to sample some Finger Lakes Region wines.  They were pretty good.  We also did a little shopping at a glass shop across the street that featured some works by our instructors.  

The last supper at the Center included their traditional ice cream that we had to hand crank.  Also one of the instructors came (Allison) and brought some of her work to sell for much better prices than we got in the shops.  All of her beads were round and the spots looked like spots, not blobs!

Tomorrow we disperse and head home.  It was a great trip.  Road Scholars makes it so 

easy and well organized.  

Here is the view from the Conference Center on Friday morning as we got ready to leave.  I would like to thank my travelling companions for their help with the photos, I was usually too busy looking at stuff to take any photos!