Transcript
Hi, my name is Ed Donovan I’m here at DC GlassWorks. You can find us at dcglassworks.com. We are a public access glass blowing facility, we also do metal and metal-casting and welding. We are primarily a teaching facility. We want to share with people the magic of glass blowing. It is an amazing substance and today I’m gonna be talking to you about glass-blowing. It’s taking this molten material and transforming it however your imagination tells you you want it to look like. Creating anything you want, it’s an amazing material. I’ve been doing it for 6 years and I absolutely love it, and I don’t think if I were to continue doing this for a life time that I would ever be able to experience all of the ways that I could manipulate glass. Adding color, shapes and forms, all of these things take years to master, and yet at the same time it’s always exciting. I’m in love with the process and I think that’s the most important thing about glass and glass blowing. Being in love with the actual process of making something. The end result, obviously I mean everybody wants that thing to exist and be really beautiful, and yet there’s so many things that can go wrong in the process that you kind of have to let that go and just be in love with the actual process of getting there and putting it away in an atelier. And then when that atelier comes down to room temperature and you can pick it up and hold it then you can be in love with the thing. I always tell students if you want to be successful at glass blowing you can’t think about the end result as much as the actual process of getting there. So in order to teach that we have these little basic steps that we start with caterpillars and then we move on to actually getting on a blowpipe. The caterpillars, or snowmen we call them, are solid so that you are basically just learning to use the jacks to do the constriction, getting used to turning the pipe and keeping your glass on center. Which is just one of the basic necessities you have to be able to turn the pipe and keep the glass on center. You start to develop an ambidexterity you really have to use both your hand at the same time doing two completely different things. It’s like the old little trick that you learn in grade school, rubbing your stomach and patting your head, glass blowing is like that.
