This past Mother’s Day we spent our Sunday in a beautiful barn in Bowdoinham, Maine. Andrew’s brother and our sister-in-law have picked up the hobby of glassblowing and thought it would be a fun experience for my mother in law. It was an afternoon of laughs, yummy food and just a bit of broken glass. 😉

First off, a little history about the art of glass blowing. According to Wikipedia, its origins date back to the 1st century BC with a Syrian craftsman. This method of inflating glass into a bubble using a blowpipe expedited the glassmaking process and brought more glass goods to the public market. This market included the Roman Empire, which ran with the new method and glassblowing boomed in their capital city. Glass soon started to replace clay in many everyday household items. Archaeologists have even found intact Roman glassware which is super impressive. Vases, storage containers and even a fish shaped vessel have been unearthed and are now in museums. The fact that we were able to make something using basically the same method is wicked cool.

We did our afternoon of glassblowing at Stone Coast Studio. Owners Cara and RJ were super nice and very patient teachers. Our hosts made sure that we were comfortable with the process before we got started by going over the equipment, safety precautions and a demo on how to make a stemless wine glass. They made it look so easy but it was trickier than it looked!

To start to the process, the glass is heated in a furnace to a temperature that makes it malleable. It’s around 2000 degrees, so super hot. Next, the glass is gathered by inserting one end of the blowpipe into the furnace, and rolling it over the molten glass until a “gob” attaches to it. You then roll the molten glass on a flat metal slab called a marver. The marver acts as a means to control the shape and temperature of the glass. We were aiming for a cylinder shape, mine was a bit stubby. Hahaha.

We then put the glass in another furnace, or glory hole, and turned it several times. The trick is to keep the glass moving so you are constantly twirling the blowpipe. It can start to gather on one side and get a little droopy looking if you don’t. This part was difficult for me, the pipe is long and surprisingly heavy but I did it! Next you roll your glass ball in some crushed glass to add color. The colors fuse to the main glass piece almost immediately due to the hot temperature. Then into the glory hole it goes for more twirling.

This is where the steps get blurry for me. Here’s a video I found that shows the process at a different studio. There was some shaping done in a round wooden cup paddle to round your glass ball. A tool called jacks was used to create a crease/line in your glass which I believe helped it to separate from your pipe later. You had to blow into the blowpipe to create sort of bubble of glass. It was really neat to watch this ball of glass balloon out.

Afterwards, you have to do some rocking of the blowpipe to elongate the glass ball. You also smacked the bottom of ballooned glass with a paddle to create a flat surface for your glass. At one point your glass was transferred to another blowpipe and that is when you used the jacks to open up one side to make it into a drinking vessel. So many steps, and they happened quickly once you got going. There were a couple of do-overs but we all came home with a unique new glass.

I definitely recommend trying your hand at this ancient craft. Be careful though, it can become addicting. If you live in Maine be sure check out Stone Coast Studio. It looks like their website is under construction so check out their Instagram for updates!