Transcript
Hello, my name is Todd Hansen. We’re here at the Art of Fire – Contemporary Glass Blowing Studio in Laytonsville, Maryland. We are at www.artoffire.com. I’ve been a glass blower for about 12 years now. I’ve got several different lines of glass-work that I work on, and I’ll be talking to you about glass blowing. There are gonna be times when you may get a really large gather and it might be too hot, you might lose control of it, but there are times when glass will fall to the floor. We have a concrete studio, our entire studio is covered in concrete. We do have rubber pads that we stand on when we’re working, but the best thing to do if glass falls on the floor: just let it go. You’re not gonna try and – you’re not gonna be able to pick it up, you’re not gonna be able to do anything with it. You certainly don’t want to put it back on your pipe because now it’s contaminated and you don’t want that to become part of the body of work. The best thing to do is just to let it trail off, separate it from the pipe as best you can, wait till it cools off and then pick up a set of tweezers or a larger set of pincers and just dump it into a bucket and let it cool. If you can recycle it some way more power to you, but if it’s gonna fall, it’s gonna fall. Don’t try and stop it, don’t try and catch it because you’re only gonna get burned. Same thing if you drop a pipe. If you feel a pipe – if you’re losing balance with a pipe and you don’t think you can control it anymore or if you’ve lost your grip or something’s going wrong, let it go. If you grab for it chances are you’re gonna grab a hot spot and pipe burn is gonna be just as bad as a glass burn. So don’t try it just let it go. Clean up later and just be thankful that nobody got hurt.
