I select my Steinert number three blowpipe. It’s appropriately thick and heavy. The tip glows. The furnace roars. I open doors and gather.
The first gather is small. A base on which to build. It’s like an opening sentence. Erasing at this point is easy. It cools quickly. Air is trapped. The first bubble expands evenly. I like this one. I’m ready for color. Shall this piece also be blue?
Cobalt does something magical to glass. My mother calls it “antique blue”. Women her age simply can not resist. The money practically leaps from their purses. Jim calls it cheating.
But today I’m saying nuts to Jim and his “If you can’t make it good, make it big, and if you can’t make it big, make it blue” glass ethic, cause I’ve got a regular gaggle of awe struck middle aged women watching me like they had never seen someone blow glass before we invaded what they thought was going to continue to be just another University of Wisconsin summer biology, ichthyology, or entomology class, erected our portable studio, and started chunking out the goodies from which they’ve already bought every blue thing in sight (and are starting to buy blue pieces still on the blowpipes) so I’m going to make this goblet big and blue; Brian sized, with a bowl that could hold a whole bottle of Cabaret Sauvignon and supported by a fat, clunky stem mashed onto a drop-pad foot with a nice and juicy lip-rap that would make any curator cringe but I’ll stick my head in the glory hole if it doesn’t sell before it even gets close to the annealing oven.
