Glassblowing Process Demonstration- Every Step of Making a Murrine Vase

Hey everybody, welcome back to the studio. In today's video we're going to be making a piece using a color pattern style called marini, and I'll be going over all of the steps involved in making this very complicated piece of artwork. But now we can go ahead and get into the studio, let's go ahead and get started. So in my hands right now these are what we call color bars. I have three different colors. I have a heliotrope, a purple, and then I also have a very stiff white color. So I'm going to chop these up and we're going to use these to do what we call pulling cane. I'm going to put them in this little oven right here and we're going to preheat them to about 1,000 degrees. After they've warmed up we can then move them over to a hotter oven on the other side of the studio where we'll be able to then stretch them across the room, which is basically what we call pulling cane. So we're going to take these big bars of glass and we're going to stretch them for the entire length of the studio. In the end it's probably going to be about 40 feet long. What this does in the end is it allows us to then break those down and we can use them in different work like the color pattern that we're going to be making today. So I'm going to pick up the white first and we'll move it over into our glory hole and it'll start to get hotter and hotter. The glory hole right here is about 2,000 degrees so that's why we preheat the glass is so that when I submerge it into that really hot area it doesn't just burst on us, which usually it would do if it was too cold. So we've preheated the tip and I'm going to attach this straight onto my iron. Like I said before we're going to end up stretching this glass all the way across the studio so I want it to be attached to my metal. Usually if you don't use white or other stiff colors you can just have a piece of clear on the bottom. You don't have to attach it straight to the iron, but in this case I want to make sure that there's no separation so we put it right onto the metal. So this is my brother Luke. He's picked up a color out of the oven and what we're going to do is we're going to drape this across the white and we'll end up kind of covering the white in that color. So now that we have the glass on there, the purple on top of the white, I have a small amount of time to really push that color around. You can see that the middle, the white, is really really cold compared to the outside which is pretty molten and red. So I only can heat it up a few times before the inside starts to really heat up and it starts to move and I lose all my stability. So I only get a few tries to really push that color around and cover the white. And as you can see it kind of looks like a hot dog or like a pig in a blanket or something, but that's basically what we're trying to do right? I have a core of white with my color on the outside. This is what we call veiled cane. So now I'm going to dip my glass back into the furnace and get a new layer of clear glass. I know you know. I know I know you know. Man, somebody commented on my YouTube page the other day. They said, Connor, keep your day job. Don't become a singer. So now we're going to move over to the marvering table where we'll really start to shape this into a nice kind of cylindrical shape. You can also see that I've pushed a lot of that clear glass back so that the tip of my glass is all the way down to the end, which is exactly what I want as well. I'm going to end up stabbing this onto what we call a post that my brother Luke is making here in just a second. And we'll be able to then, once we have it attached to the two pipes, we'll start to pull and we'll stretch it all the way across the room. There's my dad. Everybody say, hey dad. So I'll dip this in the water to cool down the tip just a little bit before we do the pull. And then I'll be able to head over, do one final dip in the water. We'll attach the glass onto the post and we can start to pull. Hey, thanks. But I really want tonight to last forever. It's pink. You see it's pink. You never know what color it is. All right. So that pull went really well. Um, I'm really happy with that. So now we're going to lower it down onto those wooden ladders right there so that it can cool down. We'll detach it. And then we're actually going to do this one more time with a different color. We're going to do the heliotrope color. So we'll be pulling pink and purple cane today. Them as pets. They're like super personable. No dude. Yeah. Talladega nights is like the partially crazy, like second greatest TV show ever breaking bad. All right. Awesome. So that went great too. That's our second pool. So now we have pink and purple cane to be able to create our pattern with this is Sophie. She's our new shop cat. You'll probably see her in a lot of the videos coming up. She's a sweetheart. Uh, she's a stray. Somebody brought to the studio and everybody's feeding her and loving on her. So this is our Marini bundle, right? I've basically taken a few different canes, purple, mostly purple, and a little bit of pink, bundled them together with some metal. And now we're going to put them in this little oven right here. This is called our garage. And we'll start to preheat it a little bit. Same thing we did with the cane. Basically we want it to hit about a thousand degrees so that when we move it over into the other oven, it doesn't all just break on us. Basically the idea with this Marini pattern is that we're going to pick up this bundle and we're going to get it nice and hot and stretch it kind of similarly that we did with the cane, but really not as far at all. We want to be able to stretch it into a nice kind of tube, and then we'll be able to cut it up and we'll get these little discs of the pattern that we've pulled. And we'll be able to lay those out on a plate to be able to create our pattern. So first we pull the cane, then we bundle this, we pull the Marini, and then we can chop it up and we'll be able to actually make our pattern out of that. So it's a kind of a long process to really get to the end product of this. So with this bundle, this type of bundle with all these canes, there's going to be a lot of gaps in the middle, right? There's going to be lots of air. So one thing, there's Sophie again, she's always walking around, but one thing I'm trying to do with our Marini pattern is I'm really trying to push all that air out of the way so I don't have any holes or gaps in our pattern in the end. All right, so this thing's gotten pretty hot. We've pushed it around. I think we've gotten a lot of the air bubbles out of the way. And now my brother Luke is going to put a little cookie right here, which we're going to use as a handle to pull so we don't lose any of our pattern. Well, I mean, the same thing happened when I was in middle school, and that's why it was frustrating to me. It was like Washington. Yeah, you played it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically the idea from now on is we want to cool down the handle so I have some stability whenever I could grab onto it, it doesn't just ooze out on me. And we really want to heat up that back section. So I'm going to dip this in the water. And I'm going to use that torch on the back like I did a second ago, and really try to heat up the middle section while the tip is nice and cold and sturdy. Now we've got our heats pretty good. And I'm going to pass this to my brother. And I'll be able to give this one big tug. And we should basically be done. So now we're going to break this down into smaller sections. We'll move it over into our annealing oven so this can cool overnight. And then tomorrow, I'll be able to come back and chop this up so that we have our small little discs. One day later. Alright, so we're back in the studio the next day. And I've got my final product of a pattern, right? We've got a lot of purple, a little bit of pink, and you've got these white cores. And you can see there's actually a really big bubble in my marini, which isn't awesome. It's got a kind of big hole through it. But that's okay. So now we're going to move to the wet saw, and we're going to start to chop this up so we get our little discs of marini pattern. When you're cutting or shaving away glass in any way, you always have to make sure that there's water cascading across it. That's because of the tiny particles that build up whenever you cut the glass. If you don't have water, you run the risk of breaking your piece. And here we go. Here's one of our little marinis. And like I said, it's kind of like a donut. You can see I had a really big bubble in the middle, which is okay. We're going to end up smushing these all together and minimizing all of those. Man, those are really pretty. But, you know, it's not really ideal. It's not something you really want. So now I'm going to lay these out on this pastorelli plate, just like a ceramic plate. And we're going to put this back in the garage so that it can heat up, preheat a little bit to about 1,000 degrees. And then we'll be able to move it over to the glory hole, and we'll start to kind of fuse it all together, squish it together so there's no gaps in between our marinis, and we'll be able to roll it up onto a pipe. So now we've got this in the garage, we've got it preheating, and I'm going to move on and set up into the making of this piece. So things can get a little time consuming, you know, when you really go into making all these patterns and try to do this kind of complicated work. But we're going to take this pastorelli plate, we're going to put it in the glory hole, and really start to heat these things up so we can start to squish them together. A little bit. Yeah, it's a nice time to get out of the house and walk around somewhere. It was like one of mine and Megan's first dates too, so it's always... Yeah, that's pretty. Yeah, I like it. Pulled the cane too. Craney, you know, chop, film chopping it up, and all that crapola. I cut my arm the other day. Today. I'm like, dude, this cat bit me. I was out there doing some fishing. Oh yeah? Beach fishing? Yeah. Fun. Man, it's hot. Woohoo! Hot, hot. Hot. I'm fine, I'm fine. Sorry. All right, let me measure, and I'll go make my bubble, and we'll go for it. All right, so we've squished all those little marinis together. We've minimized a lot of the holes and the gaps in the pattern. So now I'm going to take a blow pipe, and I'm going to gather a little bit of glass out of the furnace. Usually, whenever we make these marini pieces, we do what's called a collar. So I would like blow a bubble through this, and make like a little ring on the tip. Today's a little bit different. We're going to end up making a little bubble here, and I'm going to actually roll the marinis up on a bubble. Turn it up. This is how it's going to go. Yeah, things can get like really sketchy in here. So that glass is nice and hot right now, and I have a small amount of time to get it to just the right diameter and length. I've got my pie divider right there to tell me exactly how long or how round my bubble needs to be, and I'm going to try to shape this up, and here in just a second, my brother Luke tells me that it's the right temperature. We're going to roll it up on the bubble. All right, so that was great. My bubble was maybe a little bit too big, but right now, we're going to try to do our best to really get those marinis connected to each other. Yeah, I don't know. So in the end, we weren't able to make all those marinis touch. My bubble was too big, and it was a mistake I kind of couldn't recover from, but that's okay. Sometimes when you make little mistakes like that, it kind of gives you a different perspective on the piece, and who knows? Maybe in the end, the effect could be kind of cool, and it's something you want to do in the future too. When you're blowing glass, this stuff tends to happen a lot. Nothing's perfect, and no matter what mistakes you make, you really just can't let it derail you. You have to keep going. When I was younger, I played the violin when I was growing up, and one thing I would do when I got frustrated if I was playing a song with the orchestra is I would stop playing, and my teacher would really try to instill in me that even if you mess up, you've got to keep playing the song. You're going to mess up. It's okay, but you have to be able to see it through to the end, and that's kind of a lesson that's translated to a lot of things in my life. But we've got our roll-up. We've smoothed it out. It's not gotten any bumps or anything on the outside, which is perfect because now we're going to actually submerge it back into the furnace, and we're going to get a new layer of clear glass on top. So whenever we're gathering out of the furnace, we don't want there to be any bumps on the outside of our piece because it'll pick up little bubbles, and bubbles when you're vessel making and glass blowing are basically seen as imperfections. You don't really want them to be there. All right, so we've got our layer of glass, and this is the only gather that we're going to take for this piece. So now we're basically to our point where we can just start glass blowing and really have fun with it, right? Up until now, it's been creation of parts. You know, we take apart, we make another part, we come back the next day. Things like I said earlier, they can be really time-consuming, so it's nice to really get down to the end part where we're actually going to have this, and we're going to make our piece. This is the part of glass blowing I really, really enjoy. So now we're going to start to inflate the piece. So I'm going to take my newspaper tool. This tool is probably my favorite tool in the studio. It's about 12 sheets of newspaper that are folded up and soaked in water, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask my brother to blow, and he'll start to inflate the piece through the blow pipe while I control the expansion of the bubble with my wet newspaper. The newspaper is a really cool tool because I can hold on to the areas that I don't want to inflate, and the water will slowly chill them down, whereas the hot areas are going to start to expand more because they're so much hotter than the areas that I'm cooling down. Really, glass blowing is kind of just bubble manipulation, right? Especially vessel making. So the bubble is always going to take the path of least resistance, so really all we do is we use different tools to try to manipulate the bubble in different ways as we expand it, and either lengthen it, shorten it, expand it, you know, do a lot of different things. So we've got some pretty good volume on this piece, and now we're going to prep it to do what we call putting in the jack line. So I'm going to take my big tweezers, they're called jacks, and I'm going to put a small incision right off the tip of the pipe. This is basically establishing the area that we want to break the piece off of in the end. Later in the process, we're going to have to transfer this to a secondary pipe, and this is exactly the line that I want it to break on. So like I said before, we're basically just trying to make a small incision on it, and this will be the area that we really want it to break on when we do our transfer. Somebody told me when I was first starting to blow glass that if you get the glass to move without actually touching it, that's the way that you want to go. You know, they say the glass always remembers, so anytime I touch it or put a metal tool to it or something, it's going to leave a mark on it. Sometimes they go away, you know, but most of the time there's going to be some remnants of that mark. So we use gravity a lot to get some elongation out of this if we ever can. All right, off. Love Epcot. And it's like a trip around the world. Dude, I watch this channel. I'm like riding a ride, there'd be like all of that crap. Is there a ride to Epcot? Oh hell yeah, the best ride at Disney World is at Epcot. You can get... What's the ride at Disney World? Off. It's the Guardians of the Galaxy ride. It's at Epcot. It's at Epcot. So we've expanded this to basically our final size, and now Luke's going to take one of these wooden paddles and he's going to start to flatten the bottom so we have a nice stable base for the base to sit on. And now that we have the bottom established, Luke is going to begin to set up for the punty transfer that I was talking about before. So Luke's got a solid pipe in his hand, and he's going to gather a little bit of glass on the tip. This is what we call the punty. He's going to then shape this into a nice little dome, and we're going to stab this onto the bottom of our piece, right in the middle if we can. In vessel making, symmetry is king, so we can't really afford to not have this be directly in the middle of the piece. From here, once it cools down enough, I'm going to add a small bit of water onto our jack line, right where we want it to break. And then I'll be able to lift the pipe up, give it a little tap, and it should break right off. Yeah, I think so. All right, there we go. That transfer went really well. You know, sometimes those things can go a little haywire, but it's great. That was awesome. I'm really happy with how that went. So now we're going to be able to put our tools inside the hole that's exposed at the top from where the bubble went in originally, and we're going to flatten the lip just like Luke did a second ago with that wooden paddle, and now we can just expand it to its final size. It was so dumb. It's like a long ballroom while we drive. While we drive. Or like the cheapest ones. Well, people want to do different stuff, right? Like, uh, can you shield me? Can you go on? You know, like downtown. Oh yeah, yeah. You don't have, I mean, Universal's different too. Like, it's not the same. Like I said, man, Universal ain't no Disney. That's going to be it. All right. And with that final little manipulation, that's going to be the rest of our piece. So I'm really happy with how this thing looks right now. This is a really good one. I'm really happy with even the mistake, the kind of middle part. It looks great. I'm super happy with how it turned out, but now we have to break it off of the pipe. So we're actually going to add some water right onto our connection point, and I'll be able to tap the pipe and it'll break off and land right into my brother's Kevlar gloves where he will then transport it to the annealer so that it can cool overnight. Awesome guys. So I'm in love with this piece. I really love how the pattern came out, the lines, the colors, the little split in the middle is amazing. Um, I'm, I'm overjoyed with how this thing looks. I love making these marini pieces. They're always so much fun to kind of mess around with and to see how they look in the end. And I couldn't be happier. So everyone, if you're interested in purchasing this piece, it is available for purchase. You can find a link to it down in the description box below on either my personal website or my Etsy. And if you're looking to get ahead of the holiday shopping, check out our website. We have lots of Christmas ornaments, snowmen, some other holiday stuff. So check all that out. And thanks for hanging out with us today. Y'all can't tell you guys how much I appreciate each and every one of you. Y'all be safe out there and we'll catch you in the next video.