Making Glass

Yesterday, my mom and I went to a place called Urban Glass to make a glass heart for Valentine's day. First, you'd have to dig a heated metal pole in a furnace with molten glass at the bottom. The temperature of the furnaces is around 4000 degrees Fahrenheit: enough to keep the glass liquid-like! You have to keep turning the glass when it's on the pole to keep it balanced and to shape it for maximum perfection.
My heart came out to be red (as a heart should be!) but we could could chose among many colors. We used tools like pliers and (giant) tweezers, diamond  shears and we had to wear safety goggles. We had to remove our fleece sweaters because they are highly flammable (good to know, when you are cooking...).
After we were done with the heart, I asked the instructor if she could make me a little bit of thin glass sticks that I would be able to melt and shape over a candle flame and of course, the answer was yes. She quickly got a blob of molten glass and colored it orange, and artfully stretched it out, cut it, and gave it to me to take home. I experimented with glass and a candle all night.
The experience was awesome and my mom told me about glass factories in Murano, and showed me Youtube videos of people making incredible and beautiful artistic objects with glass. I noticed that in the videos of Murano, there was a lot of glass-blowing to inflate the object to create hollow things such as goblets, vases, bowls, and chandeliers. My grandma has a large chandelier over her dining table at her house that is very well-manufactured and it looks gorgeous! After this trial class, I look at glass very differently and start to notice it more and I think about how it was made. I find this topic very interesting and hope to take more classes later on and learn the skills of my ancestors (I am Italian and my grandmother was born in Venice).