Making A Filigrana Vase - Full Narrated Glassblowing Process

Hey everybody, welcome back to the studio. Today we're going to be making a small vase for you using a technique called filigrana. I had a blast throwing this vase together, it was so much fun. I think you guys will really like the end result. But for now, we can go ahead and get to the studio and get started. So I've done some filigrana stuff before. You know, the video that I was in with Chris at the Corning Museum of Glass, we messed around with some filigrana stuff there. And that whole experience was so much fun, it was such a privilege just to blow glass on that amphitheater. And for anyone who doesn't know, last year I had the opportunity to go to Corning in August, and I got to blow glass in the amphitheater, I took a class, I did so much stuff, it was such a great time. But let's get back to the piece. So, I'm gathering a little bit of glass out of the furnace, and we're actually going to blow a bubble into this glass. So we're not making a collar like we normally do. The idea here is that I'm going to blow this bubble, and then I'll try to keep the bubble relatively thick, but I'm going to try to make a longer bubble so that we can roll those canes up on the outside of the bubble. So I've blown into the pipe, now that bubble's going to start to just shoot out of the tip. I'll give the pipe a little swing and give us some length, and then we basically should be very close to that shape if I did everything right, the shape that I need. But my brother Luke has those canes heated up on this pastorelli plate on those big forks that he has in the glory hole back there behind me. And he's going to heat those up and compress them together, and when they're the right temperature, and I'm also the right temperature and the right shape with my bubble, we're going to roll those canes up on the exterior of this bubble. One thing about rolling up canes on a bubble instead of a collar is you have to worry about all of the bubbles that are going to get trapped in between when you sandwich this and roll it up around. In each one of those little grooves, if you don't melt it into the base correctly and push all those bubbles out, you get a lot of bubbles. But the color shows up and the pattern shows up so much more if you can roll it up on a bubble. So now Luke's going to take his final heat on this, and then when he's the right temperature, he'll let me know and we'll roll it up. Alright, so that was great. That went perfectly. I'll use my little brush to wash off any kiln wash that's on the outside, and then we're going to worry about making that connection nice and seamless. I want those two ends of those canes to come together and for it to be perfectly seamed together. Alright, awesome. So the pattern is nice and round. It's perfect. It's matched up great. And now you can see that there are some canes hanging off of the bubble, right? We have a little bit of kind of extra glass on the tip. So what I'm doing is I blew into the pipe and I capped it with my thumb so it's pressurized inside that bubble, and I'm kind of shooting the bubble down towards the tip, right? I'm pushing down while my glass is nice and hot, and it's trying to expand in all directions, but as I push down, it's forcing that bubble to go forward, so it's filling up the rest of those canes. So now that we've filled up that extra space and we've smoothed it all out, I'm going to use my jacks to create a small handle right off the tip. We're then going to dunk this in the water a few times, and then I'll heat it up and I'll actually blow into it as I grab onto that handle with my diamond shears and twist. So this is the core of, like, the filigrana technique, right? Like, I mean, mainly you really just need, like, white canes, but a lot of them are, like, twisted white canes instead of just kind of, like, straight white canes. They can be either, but usually they're twisted from what I've seen. So we make sure the midsection's really hot. We grab the tip, and then we can twist while we blow. Now, I was really trying to see how much twisting I could get out of it, so I went a little overboard with it. Also, at the bottom, right where the termination is, some of the canes tend to get jumbled up, so your pattern is really just in the middle, right? The tip is kind of a little jumbled up, and so you really want to get rid of that. So I terminated a little bit more than I should have. We blew it a little bit too thin in the end. But I was just so excited about trying to twist this up as much as I could, and it was going so well, so, you know, we ended up being able to compress it back down, but like I said, pushed it just a little bit too far. All right, so that's all the twisting that we're going to do. And now we've pulled it pretty thin. You can see that it's ruffled in a few different areas, right? It's kind of thick in certain areas, and you can see it's kind of thin in certain areas as well. So we want to compact it back down so that everything is kind of even-walled and nice and evenly thick all the way around. And we're going to use a few tools to do that, mainly the marvering table like I've been doing for this section, but I'm also going to use gravity a lot while I'm heating, and while I'm moving, and then I'm going to end up going to the bench just like right here, and we'll move to our newspaper tool, and I'll ask for air so we can start to inflate it in the areas that are uneven, and I can kind of control that bubble with my wet newspaper. So doing some compressing like this in glass can take a while, so you'll see we're going to go through the motions quite a few times, and you'll notice it's going to round out more and more every time I go back to the bench. But if I heat it up too much, then it's going to start to ruffle, and it'll collapse, and it's too cold, then, you know, my tools might crack it like this wet newspaper. So, you know, there's lots of repetition in glassblowing for that kind of reason, you know, like things are done incrementally. We don't do everything in one big step. One second. I almost don't even want to gather on it. All right, so we've compacted it back down pretty well. It's nice and smooth, especially compared to what it was looking like before. And now we're going to go for our jack line. So I'm using my torch to heat up that area right off the tip of the pipe, and now I'm going to grab my jacks, these kind of big tweezers, and we're going to put a small incision right off the tip of the pipe. So right now we're setting up for our transfer. We're going to have to transfer this to another pipe. We're going to have to stick another pipe on the tip, we'll break it off of the blowpipe that we have now, and then we'll have it flipped over on the other pipe. So doing this transfer requires that we establish an area that we want the glass to break. So putting that small incision right in there, that's basically deciding where I'm going to make the glass break once we transfer it later in the process. But now we'll inflate it up just a little bit more, and then we'll start to put the bottom on the piece. So I've got my wooden paddle, and I'm going to slowly start to push the bottom in while I ask Luke to give me air. And what I'm noticing here is that it's moving a lot because it's pretty thin. So I think we decided that we wanted to add a small patch onto the bottom. So in certain situations, whenever the bottom of the piece gets too thin, we add a small bit of glass just like this. And basically what this does is it gives us a small little landing pad or a little buffer. So this is exactly where we're going to put that new pipe whenever we transfer it just a little bit later in the process. If the bottom's too thin when we attach that pipe and we didn't put this buffer on, then when we tried to disconnect it later in the process, the bottom would just crack. So I think it was a good idea that we put this on here. And now we're just going to worry about making sure the bottom is nice and flat, and I'll have my brother go and make that punty, the new pipe that we're going to put it onto. And there's that little bit of glass. This is our punty. So it's going to act just like a little bit of glue. We're going to stab it onto the bottom, and it'll be our connection onto the piece. All right, sweet. So that went great. Now I'm going to use that same wooden paddle to make sure that it's lined up just right, nice and flat on the bottom. And then we'll move on to our fluffy torch where I'll start to heat up the tip of the piece now, which was connected to the blowpipe. It's a lot colder and chunkier than the rest of the piece, so we need to heat it up extra hot. So we've got the lip nice and hot. We're going to open it up just a little bit. And my brother Luke has some orange glass on the tip of a pipe that we're actually going to use for a little lip wrap. All right, so that went great. I'm still practicing lip wraps quite a bit. They're something that I haven't put on a lot of my work, but they're so cool. They add pop to some basic pieces, and just adding a small lip wrap to something that's white or clear or something, it really just changes the piece. And so now we're almost done with the piece. The last thing we have to do is just turn it into its final shape, which I think this was going to be more of kind of like a goldfish kind of bowl with a small kind of opening at the top. So just nice and round is what we were going for. So I'll use my jacks to open this up, and then you'll notice I'm going to use that soffietta tool to blow into the piece and inflate it so it becomes rounder and rounder. I need something. All right, so we're basically done with the piece. Everything's done. I have no more modifications to make. The last thing we need to do is disconnect it from the pipe, which, like I said, we added that little bit of glass, so we should be good. Hopefully the bottom doesn't break out or anything. But you never know. You know, thin glass likes to break, so it's always risky if it gets too thin. So I'm going to heat up my connection point so I see just a little bit of movement, and then we're going to add just a little bit of water to the connection, trying not to put any on the bottom of the piece. And then we'll be able to tap the pipe, and it should drop right into my brother's gloves, and we'll be able to transport this into the annealer to cool down overnight. All right, and here's our final product. I'm in love with how this thing turned out. The canes look great. You can feel those canes on the outside, and the orange lip wrap just makes it pop. And if anyone's interested in purchasing this piece, you can find a link to it in the description box down below. So guys, thanks for hanging out with me today. Can't tell you how much I appreciate each and every one of you. Be safe out there, and we'll catch you in the next video.