Ending on a high note.

One of our last days on the road was spent at the Canberra Glassworks. I’d gone with a group of Art teachers on a conference 15 months earlier and had been jealous of the teachers who had been able to do the practical glass-making activity.

I ‘saved’ that activity for when I would be here with the kids, and that day had FINALLY arrived. I chose to make a paperweight and had an absolute BALL doing so. First I got to choose the colours that would go into the glass. I chose blue, green and white in the hope that the end product would look like the sea. My instructor Sui was fabulous and I was pleased he approved of my choices.

Then we got some molten glass on the end of a rod and rolled it into the coloured powders.

I chose to go 'freeform' rather than structured, which meant I had to pinch and pull the glass to create waves and holes, which would start to create the bubbles in the end product. It was also lots of fun!

After the pinching and twisting, we added more glass on top, which trapped the air in the pinches and made those bubbles.

Then the big blob of glass had to be guided into shape. I had to spin it and roll is along to cool a bit before using a wooden mould to make it a proper round shape.

The final step was pinching hard to create the neck for the base, and then Sui took over to flatten the stand on the cool metal table. I was surprised to hear that the glass needed to aneal in a kiln and cool down slowly over 3 days to prevent it from shattering and being incredibly fragile. This meant that it had to be posted 'home' to Melbourne. The magic of the internet and the fact that I'm writing this EIGHT months later means that I can put a pic of the end product in!

I think I managed to achieve my objective of making it look like the sea, don't you??!