The Glass Blowing Art - The Art of Making Beautiful Glass Pieces

The glass blowing art is an art form involving the inflation of molten glass through the use of a blowpipe, or blow tube. This glass forming technique was developed in the 1st century BC when glassworkers exploited a previously unknown working property of glass: inflation. A wide range of glass blowing techniques arose within decades of its invention.

The first step to the glass blowing art is getting the glass itself, which is a mixture of limestone, sand, potash, and soda ash. After you’ve acquired the glass mixture, you’ll need to heat it.

Three furnaces are used in the glass blowing process. The first furnace is the one used to make the molten glass, by heating the mixture up to 2,400 degrees. At 2,400 degrees, the mixture will be white hot, after which it is cooled down to 2,000 degrees where it appears orange in color.

The second furnace is known as the “glory hole”. This one is used to reheat the glass to a workable temperature when you’re working on a piece. If the glass cools down too much, it won’t be viscous enough to work with.

The third furnace is the annealer, also known as the “lehr“. This is where the newly finished glass pieces are slowly cooled down over hours or even days. Cooling them down slowly ensures that the pieces don’t crack from thermal stress, because placing hot glass in too cold of an atmosphere would cause it to crack.

To begin the actually process of blowing glass, you will need a blowpipe, or blow tube. Glass blowing blowpipes need to be long enough to keep the molten glass at a safe distance from the glassblower, since the glass is over 2,000 degrees. It also needs to be rigid enough to support the glass when the blowpipe is held in a horizontal position.

The end of the blowpipe is preheated then dipped into the container of molten glass, very similarly to the way a honey gatherer is dipped into honey. The glass on the end of the blowpipe is then rolled on to the marver, which is basically a big flat sheet of steel.

From there it is moved to the bench where the glass blower uses the blowpipe and other tools to work with the glass. The glass blowing art, like many other forms of art, has many special tools that are used.

The major tools involved in glass blowing are the blowpipe, punty, bench, marver, blocks, jacks, paddles, tweezers, paper, and a variety of shears. All of these are used to help the glass blower create a beautiful work of art.

The two major techniques of the glass blowing art are free-blowing and mold-blowing. Free blowing is blowing short puffs of air into the blowpipe to cause the glass to inflate. The glass is manipulated during inflation to form the desired size and shape. Free blowing can be used to create almost any size and shape of glass.

The second major technique in the glass blowing art is mold blowing. The blowpipe is still used, but instead of shaping the piece manually, the glass is blown into a vessel or mold of some kind to get its design. So the design is done by the mold not by the glassblower. Because it takes more skill to make pieces by free blowing, free blown pieces are generally worth more.

Glass blowing is definitely not for the faint of heart, since you'll be working with a blob of molten glass that's 2,400 degrees. But, glass blowing is a very satisfying art when you have crafted a beautiful piece of glass that can be treasured by others and passed down through your family.