Blue bowl
GLASS BLOWING

Glassblowing is forming glass into various shapes while the glass is in a molten, semi-liquid state.
A person who blows glass is called a glassblower or gaffer.

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All that is required to make glass is a little sand, a little soda, a little lime and a lot of heat.
History sets the beginning of glass production nearly twenty-five hundred years earlier than that 1st century account in Mesopotamia where potters fused sand and minerals while firing their clay into glass.

The first metal blowpipe came into use in the 1st or second century before Christ and glass production soared, particularly in the Roman world, where glass became available to the rich and the poor.

The long thin metal tube used in the blowing process has changed very little since then.In the last century BC, the ancient Romans then began blowing glass inside moulds, greatly increasing the variety of shapes possible for hollow glass items.

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Perhaps the most common type of glass is called soda-lime glass.
The basic ingredients include sand (a source of silica), soda (sodium oxide),
and lime (calcium oxide). These materials are mixed together and then heated in furnaces. As the materials melt, they combine to form a syrupy liquid.
This molten glass is then withdrawn from the furnace and processed in different ways.

Tools used include a bench, marver, blocks, jacks, paddles, tweezers, shears, punty and a blowpipe.

Initially, the blowpipe is dipped into the molten glass in the first furnace and gathered. Next the glass is rolled on the marver which is a slab of steel or marble. This is important in forming a cool, harder exterior skin on the molten glass so that it can be blow effectively. Air is then blown into the blowpipe in order to create the glass art.

The modern glass blowing movement was the “Studio Glass Movement”, which began in 1962 with chemist Dominick Labino and ceramics professor Harvey Littleton.
They discovered that some glass could be melted at a low enough temperature
to allow the use of small home-studio furnaces. Their discovery sparked the advent
of art glass studios, workshops and schools.

More and more people take up courses in glass blowing, standing in front of the glaring heat of furnaces with a blowpipe in their hands and a vision in their heads, ready to bring form to the molten liquid with their breath and a few tools, roughly the same tools the Romans used over two thousand years ago. Why not you ?


The Italian Renaissance saw Venice, particularly the island of Murano, become a centre for high quality
glass manufacture in the late
medieval period.

The oldest fragments of glass
vases (evidence of the origins
of the hollow glass industry),
however, date back to the
16th century BC and were
found in Mesopotamia.


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