Inside The Glass Studio: Making A Wig Wag Bowl With Ancient Glassblowing Techniques

Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. My name's Connor, and I'm a glassblower from Florida. Today we're going to be throwing together a bowl for you guys, and we're going to be using a color pattern that we've done maybe once or twice on the channel. It's called Wig Wag. It's a pretty time-consuming pattern, so let's go ahead and get into the studio so we can get started. So these things on this little plate are called canes. We basically take long strands of glass and stretch them all the way across the studio, and then we chop them up into different kind of lengths, and we can use them to create different patterns. Today we're going to be using blue, pink, white, and green canes. We've laid all these down on this thing called a pastorelli plate. Essentially it's just a big ceramic plate with a coat of kiln wash in between the glass in it so it doesn't stick. This plate's been preheated up to about 900 degrees, about 1,000 degrees, and we're letting the canes heat up a little bit before we move them over to our bigger oven called a glory hole. So while these things are preheating, I'm going to grab a blowpipe, which essentially is just a hollow tube of metal, just kind of like a big pipe that I can blow through, and we're going to get a little bit of glass out of our furnace right here. For anybody new to the channel, this glass furnace stays on 24-7 at about 2,000 degrees and holds about 700 pounds of molten glass. We have to leave it on 24-7 or else the glass will get too cold to actually be workable. We'll cool the pipe off a little bit, and then after I shape the glass up just a little bit, we'll put a bubble into it. So I'm using this wooden block to give it a nice kind of Q-tip shape on the end, and now I'm going to blow into the pipe, tap it with my thumb, and the air will shoot down the pipe and a bubble will appear. Now I'll let this cool down quite a bit, and while I'm doing that, Will's going to go ahead and move this over to the glory hole and start to fuse these canes together. The canes have gotten pretty hot, so we'll give them a little squeeze to make sure that there's no gaps in between them, and then I'm actually going to head back over to the furnace and get another layer of clear glass on top of the bubble that we just made. The idea here is we're essentially going to roll those canes up around the exterior of my glass. So I want this next layer that I'm adding onto my bubble, which is now pretty cold, to be decently hot so that we can push out all the bubbles in between each individual groove, and then we'll have a nice cool pattern around the outside. So Will's let me know that these canes are nice and tacked together, and I've got my bubble to just the right kind of circumference so we can make this thing nice and flush all the way around it, and here in just a moment, we'll go ahead and go for the roll-up. So that went really well. You know, that move's all about timing and communication, you gotta make sure that your assistant tells you exactly how hot it is, it's good to go, and I really need to make sure that my base is just the right circumference around so that we can get a nice flush kind of connection. And it looks pretty good, there's no gaps in anything, this couldn't have gone better. So now we're going to focus on pushing that bubble all the way to the tip so we can use all of these canes. The inside bubble, the part that I rolled it up on, is very hot compared to the canes on the outside. So what we're going to do is we're going to go to the marvering table, this big metal table right here, and I'm actually blowing through the pipe right now. Well, I blew it and I capped it with my thumb, so the air's trapped in there, it's forcing the bubble out the tip, and what we're doing is, like I said, we're pushing that bubble down to the tip so we can use all of the canes. This is a very repetitive kind of thing that we're doing, so I'm going to do that marver move quite a few times, but we essentially want the bubble to start to stick out of the tip a little bit so that we can use all of the canes in the entire pattern. So at long last, we've pushed that bubble all the way down to the tip, there's no bubbles in between our canes and the base that we rolled it up on, which is perfect, and now I'm putting a small little handle on the tip, and that's basically going to be my point of leverage so that I can kind of mix this pattern up in the middle. So I want that handle to be nice and stable, and it's pretty hot right now, so we're just going to give it a little dunk into the water, and you'll be able to see that there are a bunch of surface cracks on the outside of it. It's still really, really hot, like I wouldn't touch it, but it's nice and stable now. So essentially with the wigwag pattern, we're going to start heating up different rings along this big tube that we've created, and I'm going to use that handle to start to push and pull the pattern back and forth. So we'll hit this big kind of line right here near the base, and we'll start to work our way all the way down to the handle, pulling it one way, and then going to the next ring and pulling it the other way. So if you haven't ever seen the wigwag pattern before, you'll start to get an idea of it as we get further and further through this process, but it's a really, really cool pattern. And one of the coolest things about it is that once you have this big tube and you've wigged and wagged it back and forth, then you compress it all back down, and all of the small kind of subtleties in the lines and the way that they move will all start to kind of compress, and it looks much, much, much more exaggerated once it's all compressed back down. So this is a part of the process that takes a really long time. You know, this whole thing, the whole bowl that we're making at the end, it took about three hours to make. Took almost our whole slot. We usually rent the studio for about three hours every time. And this was one of the most time-consuming parts of it. So you get a really cool pattern in the end, but it does take quite a long time to get it looking how you want it in the end. And I do apologize if the camera goes out of focus a few times. I'm actually working on getting a new camera. I'm trying to pick out the right one that won't overheat, because a big problem that we have in the studio is our cameras overheat quite a bit, because as we work, it's about 100 degrees in the studio every day. You know, we blow glass in the panhandle of Florida, so it's hot no matter what time of year you blow glass. But in the summer, it's especially hot. And my wife and I are also going to Disney World at the end of the month. So I'm kind of thinking about recording part of it and putting it on the channel. You know, they have a little hot shop at Disney World where they make little ornaments and pumpkins and stuff. So I thought it would be fun to try to blow glass there maybe, like they'd ever let me. But if you want to see our Disney World trip, say something in the comments below, you know. I thought about that whenever I was trying to monitor the furnace from home when I was here working. Yeah. Oh my God. Pizza! Yeah. Oh my God. All right. So that was the last wig or wag, whichever one you want to call it. And now we just need to get rid of this little knob on the tip. So I'm going to use my hot torch, heat it up, and then just kind of cut it away, and we'll begin the compressing process. You can take a flash real quick. So right here I'm using gravity to kind of shorten it up a little bit. You know, we use lots of tools in glassblowing, but I always heard that if you can change the shape of the glass without actually using a tool, that's the route you want to take, right? Every time we touch the glass and manipulate it in any way, really, we're messing with the heat, we're messing with the form. So if you can change it without actually using a tool, that's the best route. But I'll use my newspaper tool to kind of press back, and I'm asking for air right now so that we can have a nice, stable, round bubble. And then I'll probably go back to the marble. We're heating up this back area right now so that all of it compresses at the same time, and I don't just squish the front half and not the back. So the tip of the glass is the first thing in the glory hole, and it's the last thing out. So the tip gets exponentially more heat whenever we're heating than the back does. So we use that fluffy torch a lot to make sure that the heats are even, and we're not just kind of heating up the front, because the back needs to get just as much love as the front does. And for this piece in particular, this is only going to be one section of the bowl. We're making an incalmo bowl, so essentially what we're doing is we're going to have this be the bottom of the base. Man, that's starting to look really cool. But this is going to be the bottom half of the bowl, and then on the top parts, there's going to be a ring of purple and a ring of green. Or sorry, a ring of pink and then a ring of green. So this is just going to be the bottom section. So we're making a cup out of this, actually. We're going to create this small cup, and then we'll be able to reassemble it to the other colors whenever we make some small cups out of the pink and out of the green as well. So I'm putting in a small jack line here. This is essentially just a small line that we put in the glass that shows where we're going to break it from. It thins the glass out a little bit right there, and it also is just an indication of where it's going to break. But in a moment, we're going to add a second pipe to the tip, and we'll actually disconnect it from this pipe and transfer it to the other pipe. This is known as a punty transfer. And once we have it transferred to the new pipe, the only thing we'll have to do is just open up the lip of it to a certain size that we've predetermined, and then the cup will be done. And then we'll be able to move on to making the other two cups for the incalmo process. Incalmo is essentially just an Italian word. I think it literally means graft, but it just means to kind of attach or connect together. So when lots of other artists are making incalmo work, they'll make like holes or different vessels with different layers of color, and it creates, when you reassemble all these small cups that you make, it creates these big, long, kind of fine lines of color that kind of distinguish the different layers of the glass. And now we're going to go for that transfer that I was talking about. So we're going to tag the glass on right on the tip. I want it to be directly in the middle if I can make it happen. And now I'm actually going to put a small jack line in. This is called a sculpture punty, so it's a little bit different than a regular punty. But we're going to put a small jack line in right off the tip of it so that that's where we're going to disconnect it from whenever we break it off later. I've got a small amount of time to make sure the pipe is nice and straight while that glass is hot, and the small glass kind of freezes up pretty quickly. So, you know, I just have a small amount of time to make sure it's nice and straight. And in a moment, I'm going to add a few drops of water to that area, the first jack line we put in, where I want it to break, and then we'll have it flipped over on the new pipe. All right, Will, you ready? All right, so that went great. We have a small hole where we disconnected it from the pipe, and now I'm just using my tweezers to make sure that it's nice and straight on there while the punty's still a little hot. And like I said before, the last thing to do is we're just going to heat up the lip of this, and we'll open up that small hole to be a bigger opening. We have a small size that we've predetermined how big we want these to be so that we can reassemble them all together and all the lips match up. And once it's that size, we'll knock it off into an oven that's about 1,000 degrees. It's nice and hot, and it won't crack or anything. We'll be able to make our other cups, and then we'll assemble it all back together. Not so bad. So now that that cup's nice and safe in the oven, we're going to go ahead and pick up the color for the next one that we're going to make, and that's going to be the pink. So this is a small bar, a very thick piece of pink glass that I've just moved over to the glory hole, and we're just going to start to melt it down so it's nice and molten. I pass that off to Will, and now I'm going to get a little bit of glass out of the furnace and make what we call a collar. So before we made a bubble, right, which was just like an evenly shaped kind of bubble. But now I'm actually going to blow a very thin bubble through the pipe, and we'll be able to actually have a hole exposed on the end. So here comes that little bubble, and then I'll be able to take it over to the glory hole, and I'll... Oh, this one's coming in really, really slow, but then I'll be able to take it to the glory hole and melt away the thin layer of glass that's on the tip of that bubble, and we'll have a hole exposed. I'll then be able to use my tools to push all that glass back onto the metal to create just basically like a little metal ring or a little glass ring around the tip. This is what we call a collar. From there, when the pink glass is nice and hot, Will will bring it over to me and we'll attach it straight onto here, and I'll blow a bubble into that. Turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn. I think it's pink. Sweet. So now we're nice and hollow, and we're just going to dip this back into the furnace to get a new layer of clear glass on top, and then we'll continue in making the cup. I should have blown a little strip. Now I call this thing a cup, but really it's a tube. It's going to be like a weird shaped kind of tube. So what we need to do is similar to the collar that we just made, we need to blow this color all the way out of the tip. So I'm using my newspaper tool, which is about 10 sheets of newspaper folded up and soaked in water, and Will's blowing through the pipe, and that bubble's shooting out towards the tip, and once it's kind of exposed enough and long enough, then I'm going to put a jack line right off of the tip and create like a small little bulb. It's going to look like just a little knob on the end. Then we'll be able to knock that knob off and a hole will be exposed where the bubble kind of shot through. Actually, blow hard. All right, awesome. So the hole is exposed on the tip like we were saying before, and now we just need to open it up to that same size that we made the cup from before as well. This is going to be the lip of the cup that we're going to reattach back onto the wig wag cup we made before. But this one's actually going to be the middle cup. So we want there to be a hole on either side. So in just a moment, once this is nice and flat, we have it shaped upright, I'm going to put another jack line right off the tip of the pipe, just like this, and we'll be able to disconnect this into that same oven, and we'll be able to move on to the next cup. While this is cooling down, Will's going to go ahead and pick up the next color. That'll be our final kind of cup we're going to make, and I'll let this cool down, and then we'll go ahead and knock it off. All right, great. So both of those cups are sitting in the oven just waiting to get picked back up. They're nice and safe, not going to crack. And now we're going to make the third cup, which is going to be the green one. And this is essentially going to be the same process that we used whenever we were making the pink one, but this will be the basis for all of the reattaching. So we'll blow a bubble through the glass, we'll make the collar, we'll go ahead and attach the green, blow a bubble through that, and then we'll start to bring all the cups back together. Where'd you get the tools? I went to OCR. Oh, cool. The spring mold? Those things are cool, too. That's really cool. Oh, even better. A little once more? Perfect. Thank you. Dude, I've been crushing some anime lately. I was like, dude, I'm watching this whole show right now. It's some of my favorite when, like, Parker's out and you just get to binge the stuff. Yeah, oh my gosh, I destroyed that show. You can go on. Yeah. I did something similar, but it was with Ken Burns. The Ken Burns documentary? Yeah, I watched one on the Revolutionary War. Whatever, man, that's fine. I was getting hyped for the Fourth of July. Sure. Digestible. Yeah. But now I've watched all the shows, I feel like I want to watch. All right, awesome. So this thing's sized up pretty well. We have it just exactly like we want it to look, and now Will's going to pick up that pink cup that's going to be our middle cup, move it over to the glory hole, and we need to start heating up the lips of both of these pieces so that we can reattach them. So I've whipped out the oxypropane torch. We'll trade back and forth a few times, and when the temperatures are correct, we'll reassemble them. Come price check me when you have a moment. Looks pretty good. It'll be all right. All right, sweet. That went perfectly. And now I just need to open up the lip of that cup, because remember it's got a hole on the tip, and I'll open it up to the determined size from before, and the last thing we have to do is just add the wigwag cup back to it. By myself in the woods. Oh, sure. Hardest things to know eventually we're going to. You can go on. Sort of why we made religion. Oh, sure. Presumably. Because I'm using the bulk of it, and they won't cool down as fast as the tips. Yep. Isn't it? I don't know. I could be. That would actually not be surprising at all if it was still curry. Let me grab it. Yes. Perfect. This thing's looking pretty good. And I don't think we're going to gather on top of it. Adding these three cups is just a lot of glass, and if I was to add a third layer, then I think it would just be way too much for me to control. So I think we just make this cup out of all of this glass. I think we have everything we're going to use. So now we'll move on to trying to get rid of those seams, the little lines that we've created in between each one of them, evening the heats out a little bit, and just starting to inflate it up. Very light on. I got to go to the barber. All right, we're getting there. Yeah, this part. Not good. Right there. Keeps blowing out. Touched it down like here, and I felt the glass like rotating. I'll paper it next. All right, so this thing's looking pretty good. We inflated it up quite a bit, and now I'm going to use my fluffy torch to heat up that back area of the glass so that we can go ahead and put a jack line in it. Perfect. So with that jack line in, we can now start to really turn it into the shape of a bowl. So we're going to start to inflate it a little bit more, squat it up. I want it to be much wider than it is right now. So we're going to shorten the length of it, make it a little bit wider, and then I think we're going to add a clear foot to it as well so it has a nice little pedestal to sit on. Yeah, you see right here? That's what I was talking about. It blew pretty hard. Yeah, I probably should have gathered, but whatever. It's too big. Put a little foot on it. Let's just go for it. And here's that little foot that we were talking about. So I've cooled the bowl down quite a bit. We're going to drop a little bit of clear glass on the tip. I'll cut it off, and then we'll have a small amount of time to really shape it up into a nice kind of cylindrical shape so it's got a nice kind of little pedestal foot. So we're getting the foot shaped up, and in just a moment, Will's going to go ahead and get another pipe, get a little bit of glass on the tip, and we'll go for that punty transfer. My foot's still really hot, so it'll be moving. How are you feeling, Will? Pretty good. Yeah? Pretty close to the pipe, so I'm worried about it breaking, but we'll see. Alright, let's go. And... Alright, so that went great. Now the punty's a little hot, so I'm just making sure that it's nice and even on the pipe, because we want it to be smack dab in the middle for perfect symmetry. And then we'll worry about opening up the hole from where the bubble went in originally, and we'll start to kind of try to follow that little cascade of a line that we've made, so that the bowl has a nice kind of even transition as we open it up. I didn't grab myself the end of the fender, and he's like... I think he's like just ahead, and he says that to them. It's like, oh my god, you can go on. So funny, dude. And lose some weight! Of course. His favorite line that Bender says, or whatever. Using the newspaper tool to make bowls is one of my favorite tools to use. So, you can see that I'm spinning the pipe pretty quickly, and I'm using centripetal force to kind of fling out the wide part, while I'm kind of cupping the middle, right? So that we can just try to shape it up from the back to the front. That's one of the harder parts about bowls, is that you really have to control the widest area, and it's difficult to get the heat so far back without really letting it get really wide on you. Because the slower you turn, the less it's going to spin out, but the harder it is to turn, and you really want to turn fast. So I turn fast at the bench, but when I'm heating, I have to make sure that I turn very slowly. And this next tool is called the Parchovies. They're basically wooden jacks, and I can kind of push down in different areas and control the expansion of the bowl, without having to worry about the tips of the metal jacks kind of pushing in and leaving lines. So one of my favorite tools as well to make bowls. The newspaper and the Parchovies are almost essential. How funky it is! And guys, with this final shape, I think we're basically done. We just need to let it cool down a little bit, and then the last thing we have to do is disconnect it from the pipe, so that we can transport it into our annealer, so that it can cool down over about 24 hours. So here in just a moment, I'll apply a few drops of water to the area I want it to break off of, and it's going to be right off the tip of the punty. So just trying not to hit the bottom of the piece, but putting some water right on the tip, and we'll be able to knock it off into Will's Kevlar gloves. He'll transport it into the annealer, and we'll be all done. Alright guys, and here's the final result. I'm really happy with how this thing came out. You know, I wanted to coordinate the rings of pattern with some of the different colors that we used in the wig wag. That came out really well. The encoma process went amazingly. And I love this wig wag pattern. You know, it's used a lot in traditional kind of glassblowing, as far as like flame working is concerned. You don't really see it a whole lot in soft glass, but whenever people do it, I always think it looks really cool. So I figured today, you know, why not? And if you're interested in purchasing this piece, you can find a link to it in the description box down below. And please make sure to check out the rest of our website. We have a lot of stuff going on. Pumpkin season's coming up. So we've got lots of things for sale. Please check it out. And we also just launched a bunch of apparel. So we have some t-shirts, some hoodies, and even a hat on there. There's a link to that in the description box as well. And we also started up our Patreon page again. We're doing monthly cup giveaways. There's lessons on there as well. If you want to be like these cool people, check it out. And as usual, guys, be safe out there. We'll catch you in the next one.