My brother and I took an introductory glass fusing class at Bullseye Glass – just two hours, and look what we made!
I’m enthused that my kiln will do fused glass, as well as ceramics, but I’m restraining myself for now, since I need another artistic endeavor like I need a hole in the head 
This year I’m trying a more natural approach to my Christmas decorations, and even to my wrapping. I decided to wrap all my gifts in brown craft paper and then decorate with red ribbon and cuttings from our farm – cedar, pine cones, nandina berries, and even a few trimmings off of the new holly trees we’ve planted. I bought blank cream-colored labels, stamped and embossed a red or green glitter conifer on each, and hand-wrote the recipients’ names.
Continuing the theme of bringing nature indoors, I cut a branch from one of our white birch trees and suspended it from the kitchen ceiling, over our kitchen island. Then, using thin-guage wire, I hung the handblown ornaments that our family created at Elements Glass last year. I was nervous at first – what if it fell? – but it’s held on so far, and I love the effect.
Yes, this is a 1980s reference to Blondie, but it’s also the beautiful result of our family trip to Elements Glass. We’ve gone to Elements before to blow glass for Christmas ornaments, and for glass pumpkins at Halloween, but these were even more fun because they’re solid – no air bubbles – so we got to do a lot more hands-on work turning the glass in the fire, and spinning it in the colors, and using tools to twist and pull the hot, melty glass to form swirls and feathering and other neat effects. All three of my girls got to do just as much as us adults, and they had a great time. Love ’em!
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My brother’s latest glass blowing creation . . . this decorative bowl is absolutely gorgeous! He used multiple colors to create the striping effect, then “pulled” on the stripes when the glass was hot and malleable to create the flower. To me, it looks like flower petals floating in a water bowl . . . viewed from the side, you can actually see the top indentation, like a bowl within a bowl. Beautiful!
Elements Glass in NW Portland opens its studio every holiday season to novice glass blowers – that is, anyone who wants to give it a try. My family – including our three girls, ages 5, 8, and 10 – signed up to blow ten ornaments, and we had a wonderful time.
These were even more fun than glass blowing pumpkins at Halloween, because there were endless colors and patterns to choose. Do you want your ornament to be clear, or opaque? One color? Two? Three? More? Do you want your colors to swirl together, or form dots, or (as one of the glass blowers showed me), do you want them to “squiggle” by using tweezers to pull on the glass when it’s hot and pliable?
I would have never guessed that there were so many variables to producing a simple glass ball – each color melts and blends differently, and at different speeds, the glass must be constantly turned and repeatedly heated, and how hard you blow through the pipe – this is one of the parts that we novices got to do – dictates the shape, size, and thickness of your glass ball. My eight-year-old liked filling the hot glass balls with air so much so that her ornaments came out too big to hang on the tree! It’s truly an amazing and artistic process, I can see that you could do it your entire life and not even scratch the surface of all of the possible variations.
Elements Glass does have the process set up so that the novice glass blowers are hands-on for most of the time, but still, the artists there assisting us do most of it – we just kind of help hold the pipe, blow when we’re told to, and ask a lot of questions. Still, it’s a great way to spend a rainy holiday afternoon, and if it sparks your interest, beginning glass blowing classes start in January . . .
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My whole family — even our five-year-old — tried our hand at glass-blowing this past weekend with the help of the nice folks at Elements Glass. A fascinating process – each person got to try (with assistance) every step of the process, from gathering the molten glass onto the pipe, to rolling it in the fritt (color), to fitting the glass into the mold (to create the ridges on the pumpkin), and finally to blowing through the pipe to create the round pumpkin shape. The Elements Glass folks added the stem, placed it in a holding box to cool slowly over 24 hours and . . . ta da!
I love how the colors interact, and how many different colors you can use, how they look different after the glass has cooled . . . a whole new world to experiment with! We’re going back in December to hand blow ornaments – if you live in the Portland area, I highly recommend it!
