All that is required to make glass is a little sand, soda and lime and a lot of heat. Legend tells us that Roman seamen, preparing to cook their evening meal on a beach, set their pots on top of stones natron, a soda used for embalming the dead. As the fire heated both the stones and sand below, a strange liquid began to flow and that was the origin of manmade glass.

More accurate history sets the beginning of glass production nearly twenty-five hundred years earlier than the first century account in Mesoptamia where potters fused sand and minerals while firing their clay into glass. Nearly a thousand years later, one clever Mesopotamian managed to form a glass tube and blow a bubble at the end, creating the first blowpipe and hence the art of glassblowing.

The first metal blowpipe came into widespread use in the 1^st or 2^nd century before Christ. Glass production at this time soared, particularly in the Roman world, where glass became available to both the rich and poor. The decline of the Roman Empire brought a lull in glass making, but was revived with the rise of the Islamic world and its beautifully colored and delicately shaped glass.

Throughout its history, the production of glass would ebb and flow with the various societies of the world. The Italian Renaissance saw Venice and Murano become centers of glass making, with kings and queens seeking out those citie's gossamar creations. The British Empire's glass tradition came to the New World with Jamestown's first colonists, half a dozen of whom where glassblowers.

Throughout glass blowing's history, skilled men endured the tremendous heat needed to coax beautiful forms from the fire, using nothing more than their own breath and a few simple tools. They worked hard to polish their skills to uniformity and precision, but even so, each creation was as individual as the person who made it. In the 1820', Bakewell, Page, and Bakewell introduced the first real development in glassblowing since the pipe, when they patented a process of mechanically pressing hot glass. Suddenly the time-consuming handcrafting that all glass had required was no longer necessary and nearly everything around the home began to be made of glass.

Artists who wished to work with glass were forced into the commercial factories that mass-produced the glass objects. In 1962 Harvery Littleton reversed this decline of artistic glassblowing when he discovered that some glass could be melted at a low enough temperature to allow the use of small home-studio furnaces. This brought a rebirth of art glass studios, workshops and schools to the United States, a trend that has only accelerated both nationally and internationally.

Once again, men and women stand in front of the glaring heat of furnaces and glory holes with blowpipe in hand and a vision in their heads. Ready to bring form to the molten liquid before them, gaffers again use only their own breath and a few simple tools, roughly the same tools the Romans used over two thousand years ago.

Author: Anne Thrall (with a few minor edits)

The creation of a soft glass art piece begins with the precise mixing of sand, soda, and lime, which are the three basic components of glass. Artists used to mix by hand; now however, the mixture, called batch, is bought premixed in precise proportions.

The batch is then melted in a furnace with temperatures reaching over 2200 degrees Fahrenheit. The artist or an assistant removes the molten liquid, or gets a gather, from the furnace on the end of a hollow rod called a blowpipe. This is taken to a specially designed bench where the artist shapes the rapidly cooling molten glass with a variety of glassworking tools that have been used for centuries. An assistant might blow into the end of the pipe, creating a bubble within the glass, or the artist may melt colored glass onto the gather before the bubble is blown out.

As the assistant blows into the pipe, the once molten glass cools and begins to harden. The artist then reheats the glass in another open furnace called a glory hole until it returns to a more molten state, at which point he returns to the bench and continues to shape the emerging piece.

When the bottom of the piece is sufficiently shaped, the assistant gathers a small amount of molten glass onto a solid rod called a punty. The punty is lightly fused onto the completed bottom of the piece and the whole piece is then neatly broken off from the blowpipe onto the punty. The artist can then heat the mouth of the piece and shape it as he pleases.

Once the piece has been blown to the proper size and shaped in the desired way, the artist heats it briefly in the glory hole to ensure an even temperature throughout the whole piece. He then breaks it off of the punty into a preheated annealer. The annealer ensures that the entire piece cools consistently, otherwise the stress of the cooling glass would cause it to crack and break. The artist can remove the piece from the annealer once it has cooled to below 100 degrees Fahrenheit, a process which can take hours to days depending on the size of the piece and thickness of the glass.

If the artist so desires, the almost finished piece can then be coldworked, a process which can involve grinding, sandblasting, etching, or other methods of marking or shaping the glass.

The process of creating a finished piece from batch to final product is long and hot, with many opportunities for variation. Each piece is unique, whether it be a single vase or a set of goblets, and this individuality is what gives hand blown glass art its value. This time honored expression of artistry continues to captivate individuals around the globe, those who are proud to stand in the heat of the furnace and call themselves glassblowers.

Author: Faith Peluso

© 2004 Peluso Glass