The Satisfying Art Of Glassblowing: Creating And Using Murrine - Full Narrated Process Demonstration

That's how it goes. A little mystery to me. Hey everybody, welcome back to the studio. Today we're going to be making one of our Marini vessels for you. Marini is a type of color pattern technique that's used by making small discs that we can fuse together to create a larger pattern. Today I've taken some smaller lengths of glass, you can see the small bundle that we have in our garage here. These are a lot of different things called canes. They're small little lengths of glass about six inches long, and I've taken like 60 of them and kind of bundled them up with a little bit of steel, and what we're going to do is we're going to fuse them together. So this is just going to be our color pattern and I've moved it over to the glory hole that's much hotter than that garage, and we're just going to start to melt everything together to fuse it so that we can create our pattern. Now in between each one of these little canes is a small little bit of air, right? A little bit of gap in between each one. So part of the process here is squeezing out any bubbles possible. We want to get rid of all the gaps in between all the canes as well. The plan with all of these canes, this bundle that we have, is we're basically going to fuse it together and then we'll stretch it into a kind of like longer cane, one big like log almost. Once we have it all fused together and stretched out, we'll anneal it overnight and then we'll be able to chop it up so that we can have some smaller discs that display the pattern. There are lots of ways to make marini making these kinds of patterns. Today I decided to go with the cane one. These canes ones are basically my favorite kind. I love making these. John Cena was on with them. I won't say it on camera. Oh god. No, I know, but believe me, I'm just saying. It's a part of the internet. So it's basically all fused together and now we're going to move over to the marvering table where I can roll it around and really start to press and move those bubbles all the way to the either the tip or the back of the pipe. Either way, as long as they're out of the middle and I've moved them to one side or the other, that's basically what I'm looking for. I'll say it, I'll talk about it while I'm eating. Right, like Vietnam, right. So now that we've moved a lot of the bubbles out of the way, I'm going to put a small handle on the tip. This is what we're going to use to pull it into a long kind of cane, like I said before. So we'll give that little handle a few dips in the water so it can cool down. It'll be nice and sturdy for me. And then we're going to work on making sure that middle section is really nice and hot so that when I pull it, it pulls into a nice consistent tube. And then once this is the right temperature, I'll pass it off to Luke and we'll go for the pull. All right, that looks fine. All right, so that went pretty well. And now we're going to move these into the annealer so they can cool down overnight and tomorrow we'll be able to come back and see what we got. All right, so we're back the next day and we've got our marini. I love how the colors came out. The red looks great. The pink looks pretty good too. And now we're going to turn on the wet saw and we're actually going to start chopping this up. So depending on what you're making, you're going to want to cut these at different lengths and depending on the thickness and a lot of things, right. But we're just going to cut them into maybe just about a quarter of an inch thickness. So we leave them in a little bath of water and now I can take a look at them and see what the pattern looks like. And like I said before, each one of these little discs is going to be a part of the entire pattern. So we're actually going to be able to lay them out on a small plate and then we'll fuse them all together to create the final pattern. But now that we have that made, we can actually move on to the glassblowing portion of this. So we put all those little discs on a plate and we preheated it in one of our annealers. So now it's right around 900 degrees. Since it's preheated, we can move it over to the glory hole now, which is much, much hotter and we don't have to worry about any cracking or anything. All right. So now that we've got this thing nice and hot, we're just going to worry about really kind of mixing that heat in and really making sure that it all is consistent temperature. And we're going to start to squeeze it together to minimize all the gaps in between each little disc. So now that we have everything nice and fused together, I'm going to let my brother Luke take this and I'm going to take a small measurement of the length of that and I'm going to gather on a blow pipe. So we're going to get a small bit of glass out of the furnace and I'm actually going to blow a bubble straight through the tip of the glass that I gather. That way there's a hole exposed at the end and we're actually going to be making what we call a collar. So all I want on the tip of this is for there to be a ring of glass. So we blow through the pipe, the bubble comes out, and then I stick it back into the furnace and I blow through the pipe again to make sure that it doesn't kind of seal back off. Our plan is to roll up that pattern around this collar. So I want there to be a hole in the bottom so that I can eventually blow into it and inflate the piece. So before the glass cools down, I have a small amount of time to make sure it's the right size based off of that measurement that I took. So this next part, the actual roll-up, you have to make sure that you're having great communication with your assistant. They need to know exactly how hot the marini needs to be and they need to have it just that right temperature at just the right time. Now unfortunately we had some technical errors right when the roll-up was about to happen. So here are some examples of what it would look like but our camera cut off right when we were about to do the roll-up. So here's something that we've done on the channel from before you guys have probably seen. But basically we just roll it up, make sure that it's nice and even, and you really want to be able to match that seam up so that the pattern is nice and consistent all the way around. That's probably the hardest part about these things, making sure that it's a nice evenly consistent pattern. But the roll-up went great. It looks pretty good and now we just worry about getting that seam right. Cool. All right so everything's nice and connected. We're really going to bump the heat up and start to really fuse everything together and smash it down, get rid of all of those individual holes that are still in between those little marini discs. Yeah but we'll smooth it out first. I'll probably get you to do that marver move next. You just roll for a second. I'll come to you and go ahead and stop. We'll do that one more time. Remember that video? Yeah he's like acting like he's doing that. So we've got this thing pretty nice and smooth and now we just need to cap the tip off with a little bit of clear glass. Instead of just terminating the end like we do with a lot of other roll-ups, with marini it's nice to be able to have some clear so you can really just get rid of that and you can save all the color that you want. So we put a little patty here on the marver and I'll come over here in just a second and we'll just cap off the tube. Yeah hopefully. Yeah I don't know. But I don't know how much looking they did either. Now that we have it capped off we're going to worry about doing that same kind of termination. We're actually going to get rid of all that clear. We'll blow it up just a little bit. I'll ask for air and I'll use my newspaper tool to inflate it just how I want and then we'll cut off that clear instead of cutting off color like we usually would. You can go ahead and stop. I'll do that again. Is it? We're not in the next one. Really? And go ahead and stop. What'd you say? Oh today. Yeah. I looked already. Did you? Yeah. All right so now we have a nice even looking pattern. Everything looks great so far. It's pretty thick so we want to inflate it just a little bit but once we inflate it and smooth it out just a little bit more we're going to go for our gather. For anyone who doesn't know, gathering is the term we use whenever we get any clear glass out of the furnace. So we're planning on cooling this down once it's the right size and then we're going to dip it back in the All right I'll see you. Try to stay warm. Thank you. Good. Okay so now we have the final layer of glass that we're going to add to this piece and I'm going to use one of my wooden block tools to really even that out and place all that clear glass exactly where I want it to go while it's nice and hot. You know we cool the glass down the center of the core before we add that new layer of glass on top so we keep stability and can really move all that clear glass around. You have a small amount of time to do it before the inside starts to heat up again. And now we're going to start to inflate it so I'll ask my brother Luke to blow and I'll use my newspaper to kind of move that bubble around. Look at the same because it was uh yeah yeah it was hard to see too. All right you need some air? Blow. Cuba. Cuba just to drink a bunch of coffee? You can blow. Yeah. All right so we've inflated it quite a bit and now we're going to start to prep it to put in what we call a jack line. For anyone who doesn't know the jack line is a small incision that we put just right off the tip of the pipe and we use a tool called the jacks to put in this line which is why we call it the jack line. The small little line that we add is basically showing where we're going to break the piece from the pipe when we transfer it to a secondary pipe a little bit later in the process. You have to make sure to put in the jack line at just the right time before the glass gets really blown out and thin when you can actually really influence it push down really hard on the glass. So you can see we've got this small line right here I'm using my jacks to put that in and that'll be where we break the piece off just a little bit later. Off and talk about the weather. And now that we have the jack line put in we're going to start shaping up the bottom half of the piece to be the final shape that we want it to be. Yeah I've heard that too. Like emotional. Yeah but people never experience that. Never never had that. Fortunately enough. And blow lightly. Off or reduce. Is it the same color or different color? You can blow. Wait wait wait actually you can blow. So we've inflated it quite a bit again and we've added a little bit of length and the shape we're going for in the end is going to be a type of hourglass shape. Something that's really close to like as wide on the top as it is on the bottom with a bow in the middle. So in a moment we're going to start to add the bottom on the piece and we're actually going to then prep for that transfer that we were talking about a little bit later. When are you blowing? Tomorrow. I might freeze tomorrow. Decides he got him a custom one. I mean it's not great. So now that we've established the bottom on the piece we're going to prep for that transfer we've been talking about. Luke has the punty rod and he's going to gather a little bit of glass on the tip. This is basically going to work as just like a piece of glue that's going to connect the pipe to the bottom of the piece. We'll then attach it to the bottom of the piece, disconnect it from the blow pipe and we'll have it flipped over onto the new pipe. Usually if you're making any type of vessel something that holds water or you know anything really you're going to have to do this transfer so it's a very kind of a fundamental move and kind of dance that you have to do in the glassblowing studio. You need to make sure you have great communication with your partner, tell them what kind of punty they want, make sure it's the right temperature and make sure they bring it just at the right time. So now we're going to stab this right in the middle as right in the middle as we can and then once it's set up a little bit we'll add a little bit of water to the area we want it to break in. We'll tap the pipe and it should disconnect from the blowpipe pretty easily. Should be where Zion noodle is. Are you ready? Yeah. Like yeah we did. All right so that went great. You know if things aren't set up correctly in that step they can kind of go sideways so that was great and now we just have to worry about opening the neck up here to the final shape. I need to get hotter. This is like the first one I've ever really had. You've been a good day darling. They're really good. The other day. Give me one second. My Publix. Yeah that's right I'll go to my Jackson in a second. I'm going to hit the middle again though. I'm sure he's really trying to get it nice and in there. I'm going to paddle the top. Thank you. Okay. All right with that final move I think that's basically it. I think we're done with the piece and the last thing we have to do is just disconnect it from the pipe and transport it into one of our annealing ovens so it can cool overnight. I'll take one more flash after this. We'll take our time and we'll map torch it too. All right you ready? We got it. Sweet. All right. All right guys and here's the final product. You know I'm really happy with how this thing came out. I really like the white and the pink and the red came out a little bit differently than I thought it would but that's all right. If anyone's interested in purchasing this piece you can find a link to it in the description box down below. Hey guys thanks for hanging out with me today. I can't tell you how much I appreciate each and every one of you. You guys be safe out there. We'll catch you in the next one.