Last autumn I spent a very interesting day learning how to make glass bowls at Rainbow Glass studios in North London. My sister and brother-in-law were so interested in my description of it that they decided to go on the same course the following month, with the result that it was glassware all round as Christmas presents! We all enjoyed ourselves so much, that we decided to go there again together – with the difference that this time we weren’t complete beginners, and had an idea of what we wanted to do.
The day we settled on several months ago was last Saturday – which turned out not to be ideal for me. I was running an equipment trial at work most of last week, so was pretty shattered anyway, and when I got to the Malvern train station on Friday afternoon I found that there were no trains at all to Paddington, due to an “incident on the line” at Slough. There was an extremely helpful young man at the ticket office who was determined that I would get to London one way or another, and phoned round several train operators to make sure the ticket he was about to sell me would be accepted on their trains. In the end I was routed via Birmingham Snow Hill to London Marylebone and didn’t get to my sister’s until 10pm, absolutely exhausted.
It was worth the effort though, as the course on Saturday was excellent. There were seven of us on the course – four complete beginners and the three of us second-timers. I decided that this time I’d make fewer but bigger pieces, and made three bowls. Two are variations on a theme of abstract shards of glass, each about 25cm diameter. The third is a slightly smaller bowl, using a technique I’ve not tried before. This involved applying a grey wash of copper oxide sandwiched between two sheets of clear glass. It should come out of the kiln as a turquoise blue wash of little bubbles. I’ve also tried to texture the underside of that bowl by resting it on dots of fibre wadding in a spiral design. I’ve no idea if that will come out well or not, but it’ll be interesting to see.
Next step is for the tutor to fuse the glass in the kiln so that all the layers become one solid piece, but still lie flat. Then he’ll place the flat fused glass on a ceramic mould and heat the kiln to a lower temperature so that the glass only slightly softens, and “slumps” to take up the shape of the mould, but without destroying the pattern or texture that has already been formed. I should get the completed glass bowls through the post in a couple of weeks – I’m looking forward to seeing how they’ve come out.
