Fused Glass – Rolled up!

In some of my past blogs I have written about a couple of classes I’ve taken. One of my more recent classes was with Patty Gray where we learned to use her molds effectively. One of the pieces I made I didn’t care for a whole lot.  The glass I used only has the color on one side so when it fused you could see the edges of the glass, which was white. This wouldn’t bother most people, but I just didn’t care for it.  Here is what it looked like when I was finished creating it.

Anyway Patty  encouraged me to send it in for what she called a roll-up.  A roll-up is when a glass blower takes a fused glass slab (for the lack of a better word) and blows it into a vase. I googled roll-ups and here is a great video on how a roll-up is made. As you can see he is using the glory hole, flame, and of course a kiln in the end is to make sure it’s annealed properly so it won’t break.

Considering I’ve taken a basic class in glass blowing where the instructor did all the hard work, this is pretty impressive. I wish I could see one created in person. Oh well maybe one day. Meanwhile it took a quite a while, I sent it in at the end of Jan first of Feb and I just received my  roll-up vase yesterday. In addition it is very very expensive, but I  really do like my vase. It reminds me of the bottle from “I dream of Jeanie”. I guess I’m showing my age there! 🙂 I also like that I have so much clear in it.