Monday, October 02, 2006

Paperweight Pictures

Yesterday I made these paperweights:





My friend Vanessa made these:







This last one shows the first thing we did, a small clear glass ball. You roll the pipe with the glass on the end and use a jack (like tweezers) to pinch some at the end, it forms a narrow section. When the glass gets too hard to mold, you wait another few seconds, put a drop of water on the crease and tap the pipe and it breaks off. You can see the edge. The snowman is the same thing but with two edges jacked in. The paperweights worked the same way, but you had to work harder to jack the edge on the larger piece of glass. After they were broken off, the instructor took 2 blow torches to the break point for about 15 seconds and then pressed down with a flat surface to clean the edge.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Beautiful. They remind me of my grandmother's house...as she had a few similar glass paperweights strewn about her house. That must have been fun and interesting class.