Handblown Glass Murrine Piece, Full Glassblowing Process

Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today we have a pretty long process video for you, so make sure you got something to drink, subscribe to the channel, and let's go ahead and head to the hot shop and start to make this marini piece. So first of all, we need to create our marini pattern. So we're going to do what we call pulling taint. I've got a small bit of glass on the tip of my pipe, and in a pickup oven on the other side of the room, I have a large chunk of white glass that's preheated to a thousand degrees. This is that white chunk. It's about a quarter of this, So I've got some glass on the tip of my pipe, and I'm going to flatten it out, and then we'll pick up that white color out of the preheated oven. Now that we have the color bar picked up on the end of the pipe, I'm going to slowly start to heat it up and shape it into a cylindrical shape. We'll start by rounding out the edges, and then eventually I'll cover it in a second layer of clear glass, and we'll try to stretch it all the way across the studio. And now I'm going to put my glass inside of the furnace to collect a new layer of glass. This furnace is on at 2160 degrees. It's about as hot as lava inside of there. We never turn it off unless we have to. This furnace has been on for about five years so far. Right now, the outside of my glass is 2000 degrees, but the core is actually much colder. So I'm going to use this wooden tool to kind of cool the outside while the inside's temperature starts to rise. And now I'm going to use my marvering table to cool the outside and shape it into a nice cylindrical shape, just the shape I want, and then we just have to pull. My brother Luke is making what we call a post. So he's got a small bit of a glass on the end of a solid pipe, and he's going to make just a stand for me to stab the tip of my glass on so that we can pull in opposite directions and do a big stretch. All right, coming on this one. And there we go. Now we have our white canes, and we've pulled this so quickly that it doesn't even need to anneal. It's going to be fine once it cools off here in about five, six, ten minutes. Once the cane is cooled off, we're going to be able to chop it up into even segments, and we'll bundle it into a cylinder just like this. Use a small amount of wire, and this is the type of wire that I use, and then we'll preheat it in what we call a garage to try to make sure that that entire bundle is up to about 1,000 degrees, the same temperature as the piece of bar was before we picked it up out of the pickup. I'm doing relatively the same thing as I did before when I picked up that bar, only I need a little bit more glass to pick up that large bundle. Now that we have the canes on the pipe, we're going to try to fuse them all together and force out any bubbles that are in between the individual canes, which can be quite difficult at times. This means we're going to take multiple heats, and I'll fused, we're going to start to squeeze all those bubbles out of the tip. This little smashing tool that we have is nice to roll back and forth with. It helps to push the bubbles down towards the tip or back towards closer to my pipe. Either direction is fine as long as the bulk in the middle doesn't have many bubbles. It's all right if we have bubbles in the end. We're going to end up squishing it all together and getting rid of those once this is chopped up into small discs, which is the next step, but we want to try to eliminate as many as we can while it's hot. Let's see how this turns out. So now my brother has put a small bit of glass on the marver, and we're going to use this as a handle so that I can eventually grab onto this piece of clear glass and stretch the bulk of white that we have in the middle. The technique of pulling marini was first taught to me by an artist named Dan Alexander, who's out of St. Petersburg in Central Florida. He makes fantastic work, and his work is massive. It's larger than life, so I'm going to put his information down in the description box below if you'd like to check out his work as well. And now we've got it as hot as I can, and I'm going to pass it to my brother at off, and I'll load it into our annealer so that it can cool down, and tomorrow we'll be able to come back and see what we've got. All right, so now we're back, and this is what we've got. These long strands of marini look fantastic. I'm super happy with them. You can see all the dots on the What we're about to do is I'm going to take my wet saw, and I'm going to chop these down to be about maybe a quarter of an inch wide, and then we'll be able to create a very cool intricate pattern with them. This wet saw is a very cool tool. It's a diamond blade. You have to make sure that water is always cascading across it whenever it's in use, or else the glass will actually melt and it'll break your hands. And there we go. These look fantastic. I'm okay with how they came out. The size is great. They have some bubbles in them, some holes, but that's okay. We're going to end up putting them on a plate, and then we'll eventually fuse them all together and squeeze those bubbles out, so it's not a problem at all. You can also see I have some red marini that I pulled later in the same day to the left, and I'm going to start to put them on this pastorelli plate, which is actually already preheated, and then we'll create our pattern. Now that our pattern is created, we're going to place our plate in that garage, the same garage that we used to preheat the marini bundle before, and once it gets up to temperature, we're going to pick it up and start to slowly fuse it into a nice, flat, even plate. And now that it's preheated, we can move it over to the glory hole without it shocking it and breaking the glass. So then we'll continue to heat it up and squeeze it down so that there's no holes in between these little disks that we created. And now we'll begin to slowly squeeze all the disks together so that they fuse and create one to be able to roll this up onto a blow pipe. So you'll see me gather a small bit of glass out of the furnace, and I'm going to hang it back so that a lot of that glass falls. I'll blow a bubble straight through it, and then I'll insert this back into the furnace and continue to blow through it so that I can have a straight passage out of the end of my pipe. You can bring it over if you need to while I'm seated. Okay, I'll get up, you're fine. And now we just need to do a small check on the size, and my brother will heat this up to the correct temperature, and we'll go ahead and roll it up onto the pipe. And there we go, it seems like it's gone pretty well so far. I have a small brush to brush off any of the kiln wash that is on there, the small dusty material that used to use a separator in between the glass and the pressure plate so that it does not fuse together. Now that the glass is a nice cylinder on the end of my pipe, I'm going to try to smooth out the outside edges so there's no bumps or cracks. It's crazy. Now my brother's put a small piece of glass on the marver, and I'm going to use this to tap off the cylinder on the end of my pipe. We want to do this so that we can terminate it and turn it into a nice even closed off cylinder. I want to use the clear glass instead of trying to get rid of the pattern that I have. I'd like to retain my pattern. You can see that the bubble is coming out of the end. I'm having my brother blow through the pipe while I grab it with the newspaper tool. And then I'll use the jacks to start getting rid of all of that clear glass on the end so that my pattern is nice and even all the way around the glass. Watch your toesies! And there we go. So now we have a nice pattern, all marini, no clear on the end. This looks fantastic. I'm really happy with how this is going. Now that we have our pattern just like we'd like it, we're going to take a gather on top of it, and we'll start to create our piece. You've probably seen me use this newspaper tool quite a few times. It's one of my favorite tools to use in the studio. It's very versatile. You can use it in many different situations, and it gets your hands as close to the glass as possible without actually touching it. Hey, I ran into Dr. Roberts the other day. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. He was at gallery night. Yeah, he showed up when I was featured artist in October. I was like, hey, you're my *******, you're my principal for like four years. Of course, right when I say that, I get burned. Great, awesome. And now we're going to use the marvering table to cool down the outside and shape it up just a little bit. This table is also one of my favorite tools to use. It's a very thick metal table, and it's used as a heat sink to really cool down the glass as well as shape it. She knows Norris's sister. You know Emily. Take a little bit of air, and I'll tell you in just a moment. And now we'll start to inflate the piece. So I'm going to use that same newspaper tool to cool down the areas of the glass that I don't want to inflate while I tell my brother to start to blow through the pipe so the glass can start to really inflate and I think, uh, on light, but I have a bunch of my homies that play magic off. Uh, it's a cool game. I didn't know that. Watch the torch. This torch that you're about to see me use is called the fluffy torch. It's great for accelerating the heating in certain areas so that when I go back into the reheating chamber, the area that I've hit the torch is very, very hot, much hotter than it these tweezer-like tools that I have in my hands, and I'm going to put a small constriction point in between the end of the piece and the beginning of my blow pipe so that we can eventually break it off of this pipe and transfer it to another one. This line that I'm putting in will be exactly where the glass will break when we want it to. Glassblowing is a big team sport, so you can see that Justin is shielding my arms because they're so hot, and my brother is assisting me with the turning of the pipe so that I don't get too tired. I'll take some air and go on. Yeah, give me a little bit more. Yeah, all right. Now I'm going to use my Taglio tool to put the bottom on the piece, and we'll start to prep it up for the punty transfer. This is going to be the moment where we connect a different pipe to the bottom of the glass piece, and then we're going to end up breaking it off of this pipe, and we'll have it flipped over and transferred onto another one. My brother has made this punty, and I'm going to try to stab it onto the bottom of the piece smack dab in the middle. I've got a small amount of time to readjust before the glass on the end of the pipe cools down, but I also want to make sure that it's straight as an arrow. I want to make sure that this is directly in the center and as straight as it can be. Now we'll slightly cool down the area that I want for it to break on the jack line. I'll put a small bit of water on there with my tweezers. We'll hit the pipe, and we're off. I'm not trying to do anything super complicated with this piece. The glass colors react to light exactly like everything else does, so the darker colors heat up faster, the cooler colors are stiffer, and they don't really want to move as much. So all that I'm going to try to do with this piece is round out the edges and make yet. All we have to do is break it off of the pipe. So my brother is going to put on some Kevlar gloves. He'll come over after he preheats the gloves. I'll put a small bit of water on the connection point, and then we'll knock it off and go put it in the annealer as quickly as we can. Once in the annealer, the glass needs roughly about 12 hours to cool down. The annealing process needs to be done very carefully, or else the glass will break. And here we go! I love these patterns. You know, they always come out different. You never know what you're going to get. And this is something I'm still working on, but I always love how intricate they are and how vibrant the colors are. You get so many lines when you do these marini patterns but it's fantastic. I really love how this piece came out. And if you guys like what you saw today, make sure to like the video, make sure you subscribe to the channel with that notification bell on, comment down below, tell me exactly what you thought, and share the video with anybody who you think would find this interesting. I can't thank you guys enough for making it through the whole video. If you made it through, thank you so much. And I'll catch you guys in the next one. You know, I like doing these process videos, so we're going to be trying to do a whole lot more but until next time, be safe out there.