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LaughingTree — Yellow Spirale
Published: 2005-05-24 05:24:45 +0000 UTC; Views: 1288; Favourites: 25; Downloads: 140
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Description
This is a spirale with a cane pickup. It's about 20" tall and took about 1.5 hours to make, not including pulling the cane.Gotta love the 60's!
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Comments: 38
Oh wow.. that's really neat (or should I say groovy? 
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okey wow i really like all the stuff you have in your gallery, thanks for sharing it!!
i've tried working with glass but was pretty much a complete failure at it...
keep up the good work
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Thanks! That's certainly one thing about glass. It's got QUITE a learning curve! One of the hardest things I've ever tried to learn. Takes a lifetime to truly master it.
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oh definitely, it sure would take a lifetime. when i was in Venice this summer i went to the murano glass blowing factory type thing and holy wow those guys are crazy
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Yeah. They certainly know their stuff in Murano! Love venetian glass!
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how do you do the swirls? is it painted on, or applied and then baked in, or do you pay on strips of colored glass and smoothe it over... or how do you do it? lol
its really nice!
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Well, it's actually pretty complicated. It requires picking up pencil thick pieces of colored glass encased in clear onto a bubble ans twisting them. Then bisecting that bubble into two chambers and twisting THEM around. It creates a spiral pattern of two connecting chambers. I kjnow that's probably pretty confusing, but it's a pretty complex process... Hope that helps a little.
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lol, crazy lol. and ya, im pretty lost lol. why do youhave to bisect them, and how do you do it?
lol, i really wanna try glass blowing sometime.
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That's what makes the two chambers which swirl around themselves in the inside. To do it, you use a tool call "jacks" and put in a crease on the top and the bottom and push them closer together till they touch.
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alright, i think i understand how you bisect the strip of glass now, but i still dont see how that makes all the colored swirls on the outside... 
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The outside coloring are done wiht cane, pencil thick piece of glass that have a colored central core. I pick up a sheet of them off of a metal plate right on the outside of my bubble and that's what gives it the stripes!
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so you just wind them around the glass then?
what prevents it from bludging? it looks so smooth, or do you just work it enough that it turns smooth? (im assuming the cane is heated so that it is maliable enough to be bent around and stuff).
lol sorry for all the questions, but id like to give glass blowing a try sometime, and you seem to be pretty awesome at it, so i figured youd be a good person to ask
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Yeah. Basically you heat it up enough so that it melts smooth. It gets rid of all the ridges and valleys.
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Another gorgeous shape with lovely flowing lines and colors. I like the way it folds a little on itself.
Does it take a lot of wind power to blow glass?
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Thanks. This piece actually has two chambers inside it that twist around each other. That's what a spirale is. I have another one a bit farther back in my gallery that has a detailed shot that shows the technique a bit better.
As for windpower, it can. But surprisingly enough it's the little things (like goblets) that really take the most windpower. The bigger pieces don't require nearly as much pressure to inflate.
It's because they retain the heat so much better. The thinner littler things cool off so quickly.
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I did see your description of the spirale. I wouldn't begin to know how to get glass to do that!
What you say about the size of the glass piece makes sense. How does the windpower needed compare to blowing up a balloon? I can't blow up a balloon unless I stretch it a lot first. It would be neat if someone invented a device that would allow a machine to blow with the right kind of pressure (controlled continuously so that you have a lot of control over the actual amount of the blowing) so that a person like me could blow glass. I have always been intrigued by glassblowing. One of these days I will go to the local glassblower and watch him work and ask questions.
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It's actually not the blowing that's the tricky part. The hard part is first of all being able to handle the heat from the furnace, and secondly keeping the glass on center and hot enough to work. But the blowing is quite easy actually. Easier than blowing up a balloon, for the most part... But if you're the one working on the glass, you're not the one doing the blowing... Your assistant does that.
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So if your assistant is blowing the glass, how do you work with it while he is blowing? The only glassblowers I have watched on film have apparently blown themselves, and then they swing around the pipe to shape the glass. Maybe my memory is just faulty!
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You use tools on the glass while he/she is blowing on the other end. Then if you want to swing it and such, you have them stop blowing...
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I guess that shows how limited my experience is! The only movies I have seen of glassblowing, the blower was swinging it around, and nobody was using tools.
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Must've been in a factory then. With blowmolds. That's the only way to not use tools. But even that's really rare. USually there's SOME kind of tool usage.
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It was so long ago I can't really tell you what the situation was. So I don't know if they were doing it in a factory or not. Thanks for giving me all this information about glassblowing. It's fascinating!
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Could you explain this 'pulling the cane' you keep mentioning? You've got me quite intrigued about how you work now.
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Of course. So pretty much any piece that has colored stripes in it, for the most part is created using "Cane"
Basically I gather a lot of glass on the end of a rod, which usually consists of a colored center, with clear around it. And then I attach another rod to the other end, and pull them apart to get a really long skinny "Rope." About pencil thickness. Think of the graphite in a pencil as the colored core, and then the wood around the graphite as the clear. So that's a cane pull.
To use the cane, I arrange them on a metal plate and heat them up till they fuse together. I then roll them up around the pipe so it makes a long tube of alternating color/clear lines. I then close off the far end, and it becomes a bubble I can then blow into and alter at my own discretion.
Hope that helps.
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Very interesting, thanks a lot for explaining that. For some reason I kept thinking of cane like wood, but in the craft sense of the word I can understand the concept now. Does the process of setting it all up normally take very long? You seem to spend a long time of some of your pieces already, excluding the cane pull.
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Well, the pull takes about 20-30 minutes per color... And each pull gives me enough cane to do about 3 pieces. So it's not too bad. As for setting up the cane and heating it up and arranging it, that's all included in the times I estimated for the pieces. Only thing that isn't really included is cutting the cane into the right lengths, but that doesnt' take too long. And it's kind of relaxing actually.
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Mmmmm.... Oh, sorry it reminded me of caramel. Is it bad to want to eat glass?
This is one of my favorites.
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I've tried to eat glass before... I don't recommend it so much. Although it can feel quite nice on the lips.
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Thats so rad. I think you should decorate your house based on these colors and dance around all day like Mr.Napolian!
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wow very cool.....i wish i could make something like that...but ive never worked with glass. at least i have not yet. i will eventually haha. realy like the colors
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Thanks! I absolutely recommend working with glass if you get the opportunity! It's an incredible medium!
I love how some people will love some colors, and others will absolutely hate them! It's prety interesitng to me anyways!
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well ive done alot of different mediums.....workin on bronze casting now but this glass stuff is increasingly becoming more interesting.
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I recommend it cvery much! It has quite the learning curve and can be slightly costly... But there's nothing like it! It's incredible!
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