Glassblowing Demonstration - Creating A One Of A Kind Zanfirico Cane Bowl - Fully Narrated Process

Hey everybody, welcome back to the studio. Today we're going to be making a bowl for you and we're going to be using some intricately designed Zamfirico canes. The bowl is one of my favorite forms to make and we had a really good time throwing this one together. But let's go ahead and get into the hot shop so we can go ahead and get started. So these are the canes that I was talking about before. These are about six inches long and they house our design. These canes in particular have lots of white and blue lines that are kind of twisted around them. So we're going to lay these canes down on our pastorelli plate that's been preheated to about a thousand degrees. We'll give it about five or ten minutes to preheat and warm up and then we're going to move it over to our bigger oven. I always try to be really careful whenever I'm moving them over to this kind of bigger glory hole because inside there it's a little bit over 2,000 degrees so if these canes hadn't preheated enough, they're too cold, then they're just all going to start to break. So we're going to slowly bring these up to a hotter temperature and then we're actually going to let them all fuse together so they create a small little rectangular plate. We want them all to kind of melt together. Once they're all fused I'll be able to take a blow pipe and make it a small ring of glass on the tip of it and we'll be able to roll these up around my blow pipe. When we're heating it up we also flip the plate 180 degrees every time we come out of the glory hole because the burner inside of that hole is only on one side so if we don't flip it we get a really inconsistent heat where one side is much hotter than the other. So Will's going to take this from me and I'm going to go and make our collar. So we got a little bit of glass out of the furnace and now I'm going to blow into the pipe and we're actually going to blow a bubble straight through the glass that I collected. The plan is to eventually roll those canes up around the collar that I'm creating right so I don't want it to be closed off I want there to be an open hole at the end. And now while the glass is nice and hot I have a small amount of time to make sure that it's just the right size so that I can roll these canes up all the way around it we don't have any gaps in between them. When you're doing roll-ups like this you really need to be able to communicate with your partner a lot so Will is going to tell me whenever the glass is ready and hot enough for me to roll it up and I'm going to let him know whenever I have just the right size. My collar was just a little smaller than I wanted it to be so we're going to try to make it a little bit bigger and then here in just a moment whenever Will is ready we'll roll up the canes around the blowpipe. Sweet look at that it's pretty good. When we do the roll-up you just want to... All right awesome so we have the canes on the pipe and now my collar was still too big so I think it was too small first and then I made it too big that happens sometimes but you just got to be able to roll with the punches. So we're going to try to connect these together and then the big problem I have to deal with is I need to make sure that at the base where that big gap is we need to make sure that it's all sealed up so I'm going to start heating these up and we're going to slowly try to seal it up. This place or whatever I think it's in uh I think it's in St. Louis. There's a guy there that was uh doing a lot of like TikTok live glass blowing and stuff I forget and here. All right so we've gotten rid of all the holes in between the canes and that big gap that I kind of messed up on and now we're going to do a termination. So we're actually going to close off the form so that it's airtight and we're going to get rid of just a little bit of the glass that's on the tip. We actually take the cutoffs this little piece on the end that I'm about to get rid of and actually make different pieces with them later in the year. I really like to recycle glass so I like to collect a lot of these and then we'll use it on a piece. We actually made one or two of those before and I'll link the videos down in the description box below. So now that it's airtight we basically just have to eliminate all of the arcs in between each one of those canes. I want it to be nice and smooth on the outside because the plan is to dip this back into the furnace and get a new layer of glass on top of it. If I don't get rid of all of the arcs and all of the kind of like lines that are left from all the individual canes then when I dip it into that furnace it's going to trap a bunch of bubbles in between each one of them which is not what we want. Bubbles are really seen as imperfections in the glass world so we try to avoid bubbles at all costs. You can blow. Huge difference in my eyes you know but I wanted to try it so after this video we might change it back to 1080p. You can blow. Yeah they go so they they'll troll in uh Carpenters Creek. They come out from the bay and they'll like when uh they'll follow the boats around because they dredge because the boats will like knock up all this dust and all the fish are like moving around and stuff so they'll follow the wake. Sure the squeaks and stuff yeah yeah the kicking yeah somebody saw otters on Pensacola beach the other day. What? Otters. Otters on Pensacola beach. I was like what? All right so now we've eliminated most of the bumps and it's nice and smooth on the outside so we're going to let it cool down quite a bit more and then we're going to dip it into the furnace to get our last layer of glass. Whenever we dip the glass into the furnace it's called gathering so we're going to take a big gather of glass and I'm actually going to do what's called a strip gather so whenever I come out we're going to kind of hold it vertical and let all the excess glass drip off into this big bucket of water right here. All right so that's the only layer of glass we're going to add to it and with this much glass we're going to be able to make a pretty big bowl and right now we have a big difference in temperature right the core is really cold and the outside is very very hot you know that furnace glass is the hottest the glass will ever be able to be so I have a small amount of time to rearrange that new layer to make sure it's nice and even across the entire piece before all the temperatures kind of even out right the core will start to heat up and the outside will start to get really cold and now while we have that furnace heat I really want to carry that forward so I'm going to use my newspaper tool and I'll have Will blow into the pipe and we'll start to inflate it. So we've added some volume to it and now we're going to put in what's called a jack line we're going to make a small kind of line right off the tip of the pipe with my jacks tool right here and we're basically deciding where we want the piece to disconnect from this pipe whenever we transfer it to a different one a little bit later in the process so this thing's looking pretty good so far we've inflated it quite a bit and now we need to start to put the bottom on it so I'm going to use one of these wooden paddles and we'll slowly start to make a nice flat bottom for our bowl yes sir thank you okay so the bottom's pretty well established it's nice and flat it's exactly how I want it to be and now I'm going to get Will to go and make what we call a punty. The word punty is derived from an Italian word called pontol which essentially means little bridge or at least that's what I was told but he's going to use this pipe and shape up this little bit of glass on the tip and it's going to act like a piece of glue so we're going to attach it to the bottom I'm going to try to put it this bullseye right in the middle of it because we want it to be on a really kind of symmetrical axis when it's spinning and now we'll let it cool down just a little bit and in a moment I'll be able to add some water to that jack line and then we'll break it off of my pipe we'll have it flipped over on the punty once it's flipped over onto the punty there will be a hole from where the bubble originally went into the piece and I'll be able to use my tools to open up the bowl to its final form all right so that went great sometimes you know if the piece cools down too much or if the punty's too hot things can really kind of go sideways at that point but that was great that was a really good transfer now while that punty is nice and hot I have a small amount of time to make sure that the bottom is nice and flat on there so I'll use my tweezers and then a little paddle to make sure it's nice even and flat on the bottom and then we're going to work on just opening the bowl to its final shape now the bowl is a really difficult shape uh you know big ones are really difficult to make because you know it's all about your turning it's all about the pressure and everything that you're applying and things can kind of get really out of whack really quickly if you turn too fast or if you turn too slow or if you add too much pressure it's all about momentum and consistency so when you're making a bowl one tool that's widely used are these parchofis or wood jacks right so I can kind of pick a spot and press it down and slowly open the bowl from the back to the front the wood jacks are a really nice tool to use because they don't leave any lines they're nice and round and they're really good at making these round shapes like bowls these areas on the outside sweet it's perfect so we've used the parchofis good bit and now we're actually going to move on to using my newspaper tool for the later half of it we set up the back which is kind of like the arc that we want to keep the line moving in and now like I said we're going to use my newspaper tool and you're going to notice we're probably going to start spinning a lot faster right here so it's a lot of momentum a lot of back and forth and I'm really pushing in there with my newspaper you know it just worked out you know I picked it off of a playlist that was like you know wedding songs dancing so at this point the bowl has gotten pretty wide and you know the faster I turn the farther out the lip is going to want to go so we really want to try to control the widest point of the bowl so I'm going to start to turn slower and start to really watch how fast I'm turning the pipe not so bad let's I'll paper one more time and we'll call it all right awesome so that was kind of our final manipulation and we're basically done with the bowl but the last thing we have to do is we need to disconnect it from the pipe so what you're seeing is I'm going to heat up the punty I want to see it moving just a little bit before I add some water right to that connection point and then once I add that water we're going to give it a little tap with a piece of wood and it should pop off right into Will's Kevlar gloves we'll then be able to transport it into our annealer so that we can let it cool overnight all right awesome and here's the final product I'm in love with this thing I think it looks so good the lines came out great I really love the blue lines in between the canes it looks amazing and this bowl is available for purchase and you can find a link to it in the description box down below guys thanks for hanging out with us today I hope you guys enjoyed the process as much as we enjoyed making it you guys be safe out there and we'll catch you in the next video