by While visiting Pittsburgh, Penn., Doug and I took a class at the Pittsburgh Glass Center. I love glass art, and many years ago we’d made paperweights in a class we took while in Oregon with my mother. While that class was hands-on, a lot of it was controlled by the studio employee, resulting in a take-away you’d actually want. The two-hour bead-making class we took was 100% self-directed , and the results prove it (ha-ha!).
The Pittsburgh Glass Center, which opened in 2001, is a gallery, studio and school. There were artists actively creating in studios while we were there, which we could watch.
During our visit, there was an exhibit (see some pictures below), Undefined, featuring the top three finalists from Season 3 of the Netflix series Blown Away.
Also on display was a Dale Chihuly piece, Macchia, which he made at the studio in 2007 while he was in town for the opening of his exhibition for the Phipps Conservatory (you can see the pictures we took of that here).
The instruction was quick – our class of five was shown how to melt sticks of glass over a flame, and shape them. The instructor demonstrated how to swirl and make patterns.
Of course, our instructor made it look absolutely easy-peasy –- just touch here and swirl there and voila! The reality was not-so-much. I don’t think I got one of the nine beads I made to go in the shape I wanted. It wasn’t really frustrating, though, I mostly just kept laughing at the absurdity of my complete inability to do it.
The basic technique was to hold a mandrel (a skinny rod), melt some glass in a flame, and apply the melted glass to the mandrel as you rotate it.
You can apply more glass to make it the blob thicker, and layer more to the side to make it wider. You can add multiple colors and swirl them together using tools; you could also touch the bead-in-progress with the melted glass to make dots, which I found to be absolutely impossible.
When you’re satisfied and/or done, you put the mandrel with hot bead on it in a small oven to bake. The Center takes care of the rest, removing the mandrels from the oven I think after about three days, and removing the mandrels from the beads. I made nine beads and Doug made eight.
Once the glass gets hot, you really can’t tell what colors you have, so it was near impossible to know what your swirls and color combinations looked like. I wish I could have taken a snap-shot of the vision in my head for each bead to compare to the final product, which arrived about a month after the class.
Doug and I eagerly tore into the package, cracking up over the misshapen blobs of glass we had made (see picture at top of post). My mother had an astonishing collection of bead supplies, so we cobbled together an absolutely ridiculous necklace (Doug said it’s a “statement piece”) and two key-chains; damn straight there’s room for those in the van.
All in all, it was a lot of fun, only because I went in with low expectations.
