Autumn 2001 saw our family returning home from a Cape May vacation, and we decided to take a little detour to Millville NJ - home of the Wheaton Village Glass Museum.  Wheaton Village has a large glass furnace, and features hourly demonstrations of glassblowing. They also feature a program where you can make your own paperweight. As soon as I saw that, I wanted to make one, but the program was already full for the day.

Christmas 2001 came, and my wonderful in-laws gave me and my brother-in-law Mike gift certificates to create our own paperweights. Finally in March 2002 we arranged to meet at Wheaton Village to create our paperweights.

It was a blast! The staff artist did most of the work, but I got a feel for what glassblowing was all about. I went overboard, doing an optic sphere with a random red and white pulled swirl.

We had so much fun that Mike and I suggested to my in-laws that "maybe they should get certificates for Alison & Jen - and for Mike and I too" - and lo-and-behold, there were 4 certificates for Christmas 2002! Now to find time to get down to Millville again....

But between March and Christmas was research - I found some books on glassblowing (Beginning Glassblowing and Advanced Glassworking Techniques by Edward T. Schmid) and glass studio setup (A Glassblower's Companion: A Compilation of Studio Equipment Designs, Essays, & Glassblowing Ideas by Dudley F. Giberson) just to see if glassblowing was practical as a hobby, and to see if I should continue on to locate a local glass studio.
 

Initially UrbanGlass had only had listings for multi-week classes, on weekends and evenings - but committing the time for a 12 week class was not something I could do at the time.

However, UrbanGlass has now started having "Weekend Glassblowing", two 5 hour sessions on a Saturday & Sunday, where you get shown the methods of producing glass bottles and vases, as well as a chance to work with glass yourself.

I signed up for the April 2003 session, and really learned just how hard it is to work with glass.  I now now have some "tootsie rolls" (used to learn how to work the jacks), some "flowers" (learn how to pull glass with tweezers and diamond shears), and two "bottles" (one "drop bottle" that can actually hold water, the other bottle was supposed to be a bowl, but I had problems with the opening - I jacked the neck too small, and I blew it too thin, and got a hole in the bottom when removing it from the punty - it looks more like a blowfish than anything else). The "Sphere" I made popped into some strange shape, but it was missing when I went to pick it up - either it broke in the annealing oven, or someone else thought it was their own work.

It was very challenging, hard work, and I'm trying to decide if I want additional instruction (October 2003 - Yes, I do!) .....

In October 2003, we finally got back to Wheaton Village to make our paperweights. Alison had the same artist as I did originally, and had a great time making her paperweight (shown at left).

I need to get better pictures of these paperweights! You can not see the metallic colors in Alison's work in this picture.

I worked with a different staff artist, and did more of the work than the first time, but not as much of the work as at UrbanGlass. This one is a white and yellow spiral, a bit smaller in diameter than the 2002 paperweight. Having the previous experience made the process go much faster - I was done in half the time as Alison.
 

I'm thinking that I may just do the full UrbanGlass class in Spring 2004...