If there ever was an activity designed to underscore my spectacular lack of coolness, it’s glass blowing. From the moment I walked into the firing room at Chicago Hot Glass, I was overwhelmed by two unsettling realizations: 1) I was hot, and 2) it was not what I expected. I’d convinced myself that glass blowing would be a bastion of low-key hippies and/or retirees, happily and calmly crafting birds or flowers or some other innocuous forms. n What I’d stumbled upon was more like a nightclub, albeit one with unflatteringly bright lighting. Brazilian jazz blared from the overhead speakers as stylishly disheveled graduate students swayed back and forth, carefully balancing viscous blobs of glass at the end of glowing metal rods. It was not the red-hot pointy things that immediately put me on edge, but the grace with which everyone was moving. I have never been very good at swaying, a deficit I pin on a disastrous slow-dancing encounter in middle school (let’s just say toenails were lost).
“Oh, buck up, for heaven’s sake,” I chided myself. “It may be intimidatingly hip and bear a passing resemblance to hell in here, but I am doing this for the greater good of journalism.” Or at least for the greater good of making a paperweight.
Glassmaking, I am told by various and occasionally trustworthy sources, originated in the Middle East around 3,000 B.C., give or take a few hundred years. (My thinking is that once you’re talking about more than 500 years ago, most of us tend to lose the thread anyway). Glass blowing came along a while later, and eventually Venetian artists mastered the craft, creating exquisite and fragile works of art.
It wasn’t until much later that glass became as ubiquitous as it is today, thanks largely to a revolutionary mass-production process. These Chicago folks, apparently, didn’t get the memo, and decided it might be a fun/enlightening activity to sling melted glass around on a table in order to make a drinking cup.
Glass blowing, while a complicated and incredibly exacting skill, also requires a certain sartorial savvy. Sunglasses are required to protect from the heat (the furnaces run about 2,000 degrees) and the intense glow of the molten lava-like glass. Also, only natural fibers may be worn, presumably to avoid the potentially inflammatory effect of polyester pants exposed to high heat. It must, however, be noted that the prevailing uniform of jeans and aged T-shirts adorned with anti-establishment messages also advance the ambience.
Holly, my enormously patient instructor, met me at the door and began the tour. She showed me the gathering area and the aptly named “crucible,” where I would use either a “punty,” a straight, solid rod, or a blowpipe. The stick would be stirred in the liquefied glass until I collected enough for the piece in question-in my case, a paperweight and a vase. Then it was over to the “marver,” a metal-topped table where red-hot glass is gently prodded into shape, tapped and elongated into the desired proportions.
I was pleased to note that while I clearly had no idea what I was doing, and occasionally brandished my glowing punty with more abandon than was advisable, Holly never (visibly) lost her temper with me.
Her calm was a welcome counterpoint to the surprisingly breakneck pace of glass blowing, which demands both speed and precision. The artists dance the liquid glass around a room filled with other people, tables and blazing furnaces, shaping it quickly before it cools and shatters.
At one point during my lesson, it occurred to me that being a glass blower is very much like being a superhero: you are speedy, silent and wield a potentially deadly weapon. Before I got to the critical point in my daydream-what would the superhero’s outfit look like?-Holly thrust a punty at me and instructed me to roll it, one hand over the other, until the glass on the end was evenly distributed on the rod.
After three slightly nerve-wracking hours of reheating and shaping the glass, the products of my labors-a slightly misshapen, rounded paperweight, clear and shot through with green, and a small, mottled-blue vase-were put in the kiln, where they slowly cooled.
At pickup time the next day, I felt a quick thrill of pride. Sure, they’re not particularly attractive pieces, but they’re my not-particularly-attractive pieces. As any parent will tell you, it’s hard not to be completely fascinated by things we create out of thin air, no matter how flawed they may be.
