This weekend Zane and I tried glassblowing at an art studio in Wan Chai called Glazden! It was part of Zane’s Christmas present from me and we finally had a chance to do it.
The studio itself was really cute – it was located in this little courtyard area where a bunch of different buildings meet in the midst of all these other cute restaurants, art shops and craft stores. The studio was half outdoors and we did all of our glassblowing outside! This was especially nice because we finally had a warm, sunny weekend here – the last few weeks have been freezing, so it felt great to have the warm sun shining back down on us! (sorry for everyone who is reading this that’s in Canada).
It was only Zane and I for the workshop (they do these private workshops all day, and even have walk-in time slots available) and we each got to make our own glass cup. The first part was choosing what colours we wanted. They had all these jars laid out filled with bits of different coloured glass – there were so many different colours to choose from, I had a hard time figuring mine out! I ended up going for two shades of blue and a shade of green, and then I sprinkled some yellow throughout. When our glass cups were finished, Zane said the yellow in my cup looked like goldfish swimming around in the blue! I really liked that analogy. Zane decided to go with some yellow, orange and ivory colours for his cup.
After we chose our colours the artist had this long pole that he stuck inside a super hot cauldron of melted glass. When he pulled it out, he blew on the end until a bubble started to form (what you see in the video below). Then we rolled the hot glass blob over our coloured glass pieces. The next step was shaping the glass. For this part we sat down and held a wooden mould dipped in water in one hand, and with the other hand we rolled the poll with our glass at one end back and forth, keeping our glass in the mould. After this we blew into the pole some more to make our glasses bigger. Then we used a wooden paddle dipped in water to shape the bottom. The artist then broke our glass off the pole and turned it around, so the mouth of the glass was now facing away and the bottom of our glass was stuck to the pole. The last part was shaping the mouth of our glass, which we did using what looked like a giant pair of tweezers that we slowly used to open the mouth of the glass. The glasses were still super hot and we had to leave them over night in a cooling furnace.
We were both so excited to pick them up the next day and see how they turned out! When mine was still hot all the colours looked green, but when it was completely cooled the colours really came out. We were both so happy with how our glasses turned out, and want to go back and make some more! We’re thinking a set of six? Haha. So if we ever have any visitors who also want to give it a try, we’ll take you!
Can’t wait to start drinking out of these!
