Ok guys, so I am going to start a progression thread for my glass blowing. A little back story to how I got started. I was just a glass enthusiast collecting glass, when I started to get the itch to melt some glass myself. I am from Philadelphia, so I knew there is quite a bit of pipe history attached to my city. I always knew of illadelph, they were the top of the line when I was younger, and being from Philly loved them. Then there were also a bunch of great solo artists out of Philly as well, Zach P, Slinger, JOP, JAG, Snic and so on. I started off messaging some of these figures asking for advice on how to break in as a glass blower. There is a large scientific glass blowing program in Southern New Jersey that was recommended to me, so I started looking into that. I was also looking at some schools in Philly, but they were all hot shops working with soft glass, not boro. So it seemed my only option was the college program which was VERY expensive for me. And then out of no where one of my many emails to glass blowers got a surprising reply. I emailed a local company and basically told them I was willing to work full time for free, in order to be able to learn how to blow glass. I got the chance to go in and check out the shop and meet them. We agreed I would work 3 days a week (M-W) in return would get a full day of instructed torch time all day Thursdays. That was all I needed, a chance. That was 6 months ago. It took me 3 months of apprenticing before I ever got got good enough to be paid anything for making actual usable product. Now 6 months later I am a full time glass blower making production there M-F. I spend time on the weekend to learn some new skills and try and make things with new more technical skills. I will share with you guys some of the things I am working on. I will start posting things from when I started up until now. I will not post any of my production work, only things I am playing with for fun. Hope you enjoy!
I WILL NOT do custom orders. So please don't ask. Occasionally I will have some things for sale, but not all the time. Just need to subscribe and wait and see!
My biggest problem is remembering to take pictures of shit. I will try to do that as much as I can. So here we go!
My first skill to try and learn was a simple round bottom. Looks simple, but for a novice it takes a little while to be able to get a perfect wall weight through out the round bottom. It took me a while just to be able to see the wall weight and understand what I was trying to do. Round bottoms are an essential skill and I spent a lot of time working on them my first month.
Moving on, was gathers. Trying to gather the glass on itself to make it thicker than blowing it into a nice even ball. Not as easy as it sounds. Again took me a lot of time to get good at this:
All that worked up to one thing... My first ever smokeable spoon. Was a big deal for me and I was so excited to go home and try it out, even though I don't really smoke flowers anymore (just concentrates or dabs):
So this post will pretty much cover months 2-4. I started to progress in my spoon making abilities and started messing with dabbers. Even started doing some seals, making dry hammers and sherlocks.
As I got better I started to get more time on the torch as they started to see me progressing. More time on the torch meant more progression faster! For the first 3 months I pretty much was only on the torch one day a week. At this point they started to give me more time because they could see my progression, and love for it. I started coming in on weekends to get extra time. You can see my stuff got nicer to. I don't want to show my production work here, but that is where a lot of my time was spent trying to progress. Because production work is what I get paid for, so thats what I spend the majority of my time trying to get better at. But, I always allow myself to have some fun too, cant ever let yourself get tired of work, gotta stay creative and keep it fun. So here is some more of my progression. I think this post will almost take us up to date. Months 4-6:
I have been buying Milli lately and just started playing with that. Trying to figure it out. I also made my very first bubbler. Kind of shitty looking but I FINALLY figured out how to put that down stem in there LOL. Will be making some more... I really liked how the wig wag milli dome came out, so I will def be playing with more milli domes. Some more recent stuff:
Messing around with some simpsons milli I picked up. I was going to make a little charecter dome. Put on krusty fucking sideways though and I got mad and stopped lol. I may finish it tomorrow. Anyone interested in simpsons milli dome?
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