The Largest Glass Rondel I've Ever Made - Narrated Glassblowing Demonstration

Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today in the studio we're going to be using some leftover canes to create one of my favorite forms, the rondelle, and we're going to see just how big we can make this thing, but for now let's go ahead and go to the hot shop so we can get started. So I had some leftover twisty canes from some different projects over the years, so I figured I'd throw them together for a little roll-up and we're going to make a small cup out of this so that these will be the inside kind of pattern for our rondelle. So for anyone who doesn't know, these canes are made of different color patterns, sometimes they're just straight colors like you see these pink ones with white in the middle or just kind of regular canes, but then I also have a lot of them that are twisted canes. Pulling cane is a process where we basically take glass and stretch it across the studio into these long strands. They can be complex twisted canes or more basic, but we basically use them to create patterns in the glass later in the process. So we can put them out on the passarelli plate, the ceramic plate right here, and then we begin to heat them up so they become molten, they fuse together, and they create a small little plate. From there I can roll them up onto a blow pipe and then I basically have that pattern on the pipe and I can blow glass and create a vessel with it. So we're going to get these canes nice and hot and squeeze them together so they all fuse and then I'll be able to grab a blow pipe and I'll get a little bit of glass out of the furnace to make what we call a collar. So I'm going to get a little bit of glass and here in just a second I'll actually blow into the pipe and a little bubble will come out the tip. It's a very thin bubble so I can actually put it back into the furnace and all that glass will melt away. I can blow through the pipe because I want to make sure that I have a straight shot out of the tip. I don't want any glass to be covering up the hole. So now while the glass is nice and hot I have a small amount of time to where I can manipulate it to where it's just the right size because I want to roll that plate up around my collar. So we took a small measurement just to see how big the collar needs to be. This is with a pi divider and then when the glass is just hot enough I can roll it up onto the blow pipe. All right so that went great. Now we're going to dust off some of that kiln wash. There's like a small kind of powdered layer that protects the glass from sticking to the ceramic shelf. So we'll dust some of that off and make sure everything's lined up right and then we can really start to melt this. So we just want to make sure that there's no kind of gaps in any of the canes. We want to make sure everything's lining up just right and we'll really start to melt it in so everything can really fuse and we lose all of the kind of roundness that comes with each individual cane. Once everything's nice and melted in I'll be able to use my jacks, my kind of big tweezer tools, and we'll do what we call a termination where I'm actually going to cut off the tip of this roll up to seal off a bubble on the inside. Nah I figured you were going to say no. So a lot of people ask what we do with these cutoffs. We actually use them to make other pieces and sometimes make magnets out of them but they're really cool and people always love the cutoffs. And if you take a look at our channel I'll actually put it down in the description below. We have a few videos where we've actually made pieces with these cutoffs. They look really cool too. So now that we have everything cut off we have essentially a bubble on the inside of our canes. We're going to work on compacting this down and really smoothing the outside. And like I said a cup where basically we will be able to attach it back onto the final piece but this is going to be the center of our big kind of platter, our large rondelle. So we're making a small cup out of it and we'll be able to rejoin it back to the actual piece a little later in the process. So this thing's cooled down quite a bit now. It's just the right shape, just the right size, and we're actually going to have to transfer it to a different pipe so that we can finish making the cup. So my brother Luke has gotten what we call a punty which basically is a solid pipe that has a small bit of glass on the tip and we're going to use this as glue and we're actually going to transfer it to this new pipe. So I'm going to break it off of the original pipe and that way we'll have it flipped over with a hole exposed at the top. This way, now that that hole is at the top, I can use my tools to open it up and we'll have a small cup. She's being battled. All right, so the cup's now just the right size and we're actually going to knock this off into a pickup oven that's preheated to about a thousand degrees so it stays nice and healthy, it's not going to crack or anything, and then like I said we're going to actually bring it back out and reattach it onto the final form. So now we're actually going to begin making the final piece. So Luke's going to go ahead and pick up a purple color out of the color box and I'll take a blow pipe and I'm going to gather a little bit of glass out of the furnace. For anyone who doesn't know, this furnace houses all of our clear glass. It's about 2,000 degrees on the inside. Now while the glass is nice and hot, I have a small amount of time to manipulate it before it cools down. So I use this small wooden tool called a block to really shape it while it's nice and hot and then I can blow a bubble into it. This is what we call putting in the starter bubble. So now that we're hollow on the inside, I'm going to shape it just a little bit more and let it cool down and Luke is going to actually get that purple glass extra hot and we'll be able to attach it to the top of this and spread it across that bubble so we have a good layer of purple glass right on top of my clear. And there's that purple glass. Luke's getting it into just the right shape and this is what we call a color overlay, where we basically will take the color and we'll overlay it across our bubble. So once everything's applied correctly and we have a nice smooth surface and all the color is distributed evenly, we can take it back to the furnace and we'll gather a new layer of clear glass on top of it. Why'd you stop? Because I got tired of hearing. I was like, oh cool, I can listen to like that person talk, you know, or like whatever. All right, so now that we have that new layer of clear glass on top of it, we basically need to start to prep it to be able to reattach that cup that we made before. So the idea here is we're going to blow the bubble all the way down to the tip and then we'll actually cut the tip of it off and we'll be able to grab that cup we put in the color oven, bring it back over and attach it onto the tip. This process is called incalmo, where we basically have two cups and we join the lips together to give us a fine line of detail. And you can do this with regular colors or you can do it with intricate designs, but it just gives you different kind of fine lines of different patterns or colors, really whatever you decide to use. So we put a little handle on the tip of this and we're actually going to knock this off and there should be a little hole on the tip. So now we've basically done the opposite of what we did with the roll-up, right? With the roll-up, we closed it off and got rid of the tip and now we've opened up the tip so we can attach the cup onto this once we open it up with our tools. Dude, that sucks. So once everything is the right size, we're going to go pick up that cup out of the color oven and then we'll start to heat it back up so we can attach it onto the tip of our now tube of purple. So now that the cup is getting nice and hot, we basically just have to bring both of the lips up to a nice hot temperature so we can bring them together and they'll seal and really fuse together. So we'll take a quick measurement. We want to make sure they're both just the right size and then we'll actually trade back and forth a few times so that I can heat these up with the torch and then Luke will take it to the big heater and we'll really just try to bring everything up to a nice hot kind of healthy level. And then once everything is nice and hot, we can do our assembly. All right, awesome. So that went great and now basically what we're going to try to do is we're going to get rid of that little knob on the tip and then we're going to work on compacting this down just a little bit and we're really going to try to get rid of that seam. And once it's nice and compacted down and everything's nice and smooth, we'll add our final layer of glass to it. We got like five battery bars when we got back. Yeah, sure. All right, so now that we have our final layer of glass, we're going to really start to shape it into a nice round shape. The setup for these rondelles looks a lot like a bowl, so I use my newspaper tool quite a bit where I'll cup the end and I'll ask for air so we can really inflate that mid section while my newspaper tool is stopping the bubble from shooting down too far towards the tip. Blow lightly for me. All right, so we've blown this thing up quite a bit and now we're going to prep to actually put in what we call a jack line. So later in the process, we're going to have to transfer this just like we did whenever we were making that cup in the beginning. So I'm going to heat up the area with that torch so that we can put a really good jack line in there. Basically put, the jack line is a small incision that we put where we basically want the glass to break once we do the transfer. We need for a certain part of the piece to be able to break so that we know exactly where it's going to break whenever we transfer it to the second pipe. So you have to put this line in kind of early in the process. If you wait too long and it gets too wide, you really risk losing the piece. So part of the process is deciding to put in the jack line just at the right point to where we can really save the shape but we can make sure that we have a really definitive area that it's going to disconnect from so we don't risk breaking the piece in a different way. But now that the jack line is in, we're going to go back to the newspaper tool primarily and we're just going to work on inflating this quite a bit more. All right, I know some of it's repetitive like I was saying before. No, no, no, all good, all good. So you can see I'm really pushing in with my newspaper tool and I'm letting that midsection kind of expand as much as I can. I really want this thing to be nice and wide before we do the transfer and I also want the bottom of it to be as flat as possible. So we're actually going to move to a paddle here in just a moment and we'll start to give it a nice flat bottom till we can punty it up good. You can blow. Blow again. All right, thank you. All right, so the bottom looks great on this thing. We're nice and symmetrical. So now it's time for our punty transfer. Luke's going to grab another punty, get a little bit of glass, and we'll stick it up. All right, ready? All right, so that went great. And now that we have the hole exposed at the top, we'll get that nice and hot and I can use my tools to start to open it up. It's better. It's more real. Yeah, yeah. Not so much drama. Woo, my arm. Holy ----. Yeah, shield me. That looks great. I'm going to open it again. You could shield my arm. Okay. So I decided to switch to the wooden jacks. These are called the they live in water, just like the wooden tools that I was using before. And they're really good at pushing the glass in certain ways without leaving lines. You know, they're not pointy like the jacks. They don't leave like lines whenever you touch the tips on the glass. So they're really good at putting like round edges and opening things with more of a kind of soft look. It's like, all right, so we've opened this thing up quite a bit and it basically looks like a bowl. This is almost like the same setup as a bowl. It's just a little bit different. And now we're going to work on really heating up that kind of top section before we go for the final move. All right, biggie. All right, we're getting there. We're getting there. Ready? All right. You can open. So we just spin and spin and spin and spin to make sure it's extra, extra flat. And now Luke's going to grab some paddles and really make sure that we don't have many bins in it or anything. And it's as flat as it can be. And the last thing we have to do is knock it off the pipe. So we add a little bit of water right where we want it to break. And then we can tap it off onto this little pizza paddle that we've made and we'll put it in our annealer to cool down overnight. Oh yeah. Awesome. All right. And here's the final product. You know, I love making these things. I really want to make more and more of them. The inside looks so intricate and the canes are always so cool. The outside, the color always looks so good. I love how they display. I love the showcase of the color and the pattern. I just think they're great. And guys, this is available for purchase for anyone who'd like to pick this guy up. You can find the link in the description box down below. And thanks for hanging out with me today, guys. Be safe out there. I'll catch you in the next one.