Green And White Encalmo Bowl, Glassblowing Demonstration With Narration

Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today in the Haunt Shop we're going to be making a small bowl using a glass color technique called encomo. So make sure you're subscribed to the channel and let's head to the studio. So first we'll start off by picking up a small bit of green glass out of our color box right here. This box is on and has been on for about two hours and it's at about a thousand degrees. So as you can see I've gotten my glass pretty hot and now we'll begin to shape it into what we call a color overlay. This green glass will be spread across a clear bubble to create an even layer of color. And now I can pass this off to Cory and I'll go and get my bubble started. So I'll get just a little bit of clear glass out of my furnace. This furnace is on at about 2160 degrees and it holds all of our clear glass, about 700 pounds of it. My pipe was quite hot so I'm going to cool it down and wipe off the excess water and then I'll head to my bench to start to shape it up. This wooden tool you see me use is called a block. We have them in multiple sizes, some that are so big we have to put them on a table. What they do is they cool down the glass and round it out so that a bubble can expand into that space evenly. And now you'll see me blow through the pipe and cap it with my thumb. When the air hits the heat it pressurizes and it takes the path of least resistance which is straight out of the pipe and into the glass. Now I want to let my bubble cool down while Cory heats up the color so that I can have a nice solid base to be able to spread that green glass across. This process is known as a color overlay. Now while the glass on the end of my cold bubble is hot, I'm going to try to spread it across my bubble to create an evenly distributed layer of glass. You only have a small window of time to spread the glass across the clear bubble because we want the glasses on the inside to be very cold compared to the outside. So as we take more heats and do that process over and over, the heats will start to even out. My base will start to get hotter and the outside will start to get a little bit cooler. So you want to spread it out as quickly as you can. And now we have our color distributed just like we want it to be. So I'm going to let it cool down just a bit before we plunge back into the furnace to get another gather of glass. So this is a little bit of a different gather. This is what we call a strip gather. So when I come out, you'll see me tilt the pipe vertical and gravity will get rid of any excess glass that I don't want to be on the piece. And now we can begin to inflate this. So you'll see me use my newspaper tool to cool down the outside and then I'll tell Cory when I want him to start inflating the piece. And some light air on. You can blow a little harder. Thank you, that was perfect. And now we're going to begin to start to set this up for the encomo process. What I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to cut a hole into the tip of this piece of glass so that we have a tube that's open on the end. And now I'm going to use my tweezers to start to pick open a hole at the end of the tube. So I was successful in opening up the tube, but unfortunately I pushed a little bit too much and it caused the glass to fold in on itself. So right there where it's extra orange on the tip, there's a lot more glass. It's double layered. So now all I have to do is cut off that piece on the end and we should have a perfect tube for our process. Now let me explain a bit more about the process for a moment. The encomo technique is when we bring together two cups of glass to create different color patterns with a fine line between them. I've pre-made a cup that we'll attach to the end of this tube to seal it off and we've preheated that cup up to about a thousand degrees. So once we get rid of this glass on the end and we open it back up to the designated size, I'll have Corey go and pick up that cup out of the color oven and we'll be good to go. And you can pick up that cup and we're ready. I'm the right size. And now once the cup's up from about a thousand degrees we've preheated it to to a more sustainable temperature, Corey's going to take this brush and get rid of any kiln wash that might be on the lip of it. And now as long as we make sure that our connection points are nice and hot we should be good to go. All right and that was great that went very very smoothly. And now that I've got both the cups up to being the same temperature what we're going to do is we're going to start to condense it and try to get rid of the seam where we connected the two pieces. Once it's all smooth on the outside we can start to turn it into our bowl. They make capsules. Yeah. Yeah. Oh I know you know. And now we can begin the blowing process. So I'm using my newspaper tool which is just about 10 sheets of newspaper folded up and soaked in water and what I'm doing is I'm picking a certain plane and cooling it down. A glass likes to take the path of grease resistance so any area that I cool down it will slow down the expansion in that area. You'll see me use this torch a lot it's called a fluffy torch and we use it to get certain sections of the glass hotter so that whenever we enter the reheating chamber again it will be exponentially hot in those zones. I want the back area to puff up just a little bit so that's why I was hitting it with that torch. So now we'll start to put in our jack line. This is a small incision that I'm putting in between where I want my piece to stop and where the tip of my pipe is. Eventually we'll have to transfer this piece to another pipe so we'll take a different pipe stick it onto the bottom of our piece right here and break it off of the original blow pipe. We still have a little while before we get to that step but that step is called the do what we call a drop foot. This process is very similar to the color overlay that we did before only we'll be using clear glass and we'll be applying it to the bottom of our bowl. And now once that little pedestal is cooled down a little bit we're going to go for our punty transfer. So Cory has a small bit of glass that he's put on the end of a solid pipe and I'm going to try to put this as almost dead in the center as I can and we're going to end up breaking it off of the pipe that I've been using the whole time, my blow pipe, so that we'll have it flipped over onto this solid punty. Doing this transfer will expose a hole at the top where the bubble first entered the piece so I'll be able to use my tools to open it up and give it the nice bowl shape that I'm looking for. I'm going to use my soffietta tool to puff this glass up from the inside to open up that. All right and now that we're all done the last thing we have to do is knock it off the pipe. So now you'll see me apply just a small bit of water onto the place that I want to disconnect and I'll knock it off into Cory's Kevlar gloves. Now it's a little bit of a mad dash to get this thing inside of the annealer. This small kiln that I'm going to open on the other side of the room is on at about 900 degrees and after we made this piece we turned it off and it took us about 12 hours to cool down. And here's our final product. I can't tell you guys how much I love this bowl. It came out great. The connection went really well, the colors came out way better than I thought they would, I love this little centerpiece, it's fantastic. The twisted canes look great on it as well. This blew me away. I was very very happy with how this turned out. And guys if you enjoyed the process today please make sure to subscribe to the channel, like the video, share it with somebody who you think might find it interesting too, and comment down below. And so until next time you guys take it easy.