I shared this dtube video of me blowing glass yesterday and while it was our longest dtube video yet it didn't show the whole process of creating what ended up to be funny shaped pieces at best which took several hours. The guy that first let me on a torch 7 years ago told me that it was nearly a year before he was "able to produce anything he liked enough to sell" and while I haven't been that severe I totally get what he means. He also gave me the advice to "not expect things to turn out how I envision them for a long time" and he was right.
This is the tale of two wonky bubblers, I'll share what went wrong as critically as possible. It's easy to quickly glance at these photos and admire the glass but there are huge flaws which honestly just offer opportunities.
This guy for example is not only lopsided but it's misshapen. The neck you see is not the original one I made for it, it was easier to improvise a neck (or so I thought) than the entire piece once I realized I'd totally done it wrong.
See that lean? Not okay.
See that white stripe to account for the unlevel bowl because it's shaped like a mess? Not cool. It makes it functional and someone could probably smoke out of this pipe for years without it breaking if they're careful, but it's messy and less strong.
Oddly enough, the one redeeming quality is the bottom.
The other one was supposed to have a green and white neck as well, you see how well that turned out. But about this piece, literally nothing about it is straight. It is however, perfectly functional and fairly sturdy for being so janky.
The whitish squiggle you see is my attempt at developing my silver fuming skills.
You can make pretty awesome space pipes with silver fuming over blue or black glass. I'm not very good at that yet.
The white bit used a technique called the solid color blowout, where you literally take a rod of solid color, melt a gob on the end of a tube and blow it out. It's generally much neater than this...
The speckles you see in the skinny part are silver flakes, one of my favorite features of the piece.
As you can see, I can make functional things but they don't yet look how I want them. Keep in mind this is really the first time I've made one of these in more than 6 months, so I'm very out of practice and the fact that I ended with something functional is what I'm happy about.
Something most people don't know is that you don't always end up with a finished product as a glassblower. I've heard glassworkers say things along the lines of "All I could do today was break glass and burn myself" (in reference to the down day we're all bound to experience eventually" and it was coming from professionals. It's so easy for something to go wrong in terms of personal injury or damage to the product during and after the production process. I've seen videos of thousand dollar pieces going to the kiln only to fall off the handle and smash all over the floor. It's like having someone take a flamethrower to a Picasso painting just after it was completed.
Check out the links below for more like this one!
Back on the Torch: Lily Da Vine Blowing Glass on D.tube
Scientific Glass Adventures: More Cannabis Exctracter Tubes
Dab Straw: A Fun, Simple Solution to Dabbing
In case you missed them, some of my recent posts:
The Carnivore Experiment: Day 21
Vinoteca Fancy Alcohol Store in Suburb Diamante
Just Keep Crafting: Mia Mini Sewing Machine for Less Than 20 USD is a Boss
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