I’ve had bad luck with little red cups. I had one that I made last year that I gave away to a friend, so I wanted to make a new one to replace it. I made one the first day, and it looked pretty good, but it fell off the punti because I pushed too hard with the jacks.  Then I made a second one that survived annealing, only to get broken while removing the bit of punti that remained. this is the third one and I think it turned out okay.

It does strike me as ironic that I still can’t make cups as good as the cheap Mexican ones you find in Tucson or at Macayos.

I’d been having trouble remembering how to make nice flowers, and Josh stopped by and gave me a demo. He makes some really spectacular flowers, in multiple colors, and if you want one, I think he has some for sale at the Mesa Art Center museum.

He suggested snipping the disc of hot glass into six divisions, then heating it again,  which causes the snips to pull back in on themselves. Sure enough, the next flower I made with this technique was worlds better than the mutant flowers.

I did this flower after the mutant flower turned out so badly. As you can see, I used the same colors, but this one looks more like a morning glory and less like the tentacle of an alien whose parents were exposed to too much gamma radiation. I don’t actually like morning glories that much, but at least it’s symmetrical.

Sometimes we make simple flowers in hot shop when class isn’ t yet over, but there isn’t enough time to make a vessel. You get a small gather, heat some frit into it, press it into a disk, then get it nice and hot and molten.  Sitting at the bench, you use the tweezers to pull the disc into a flower.

If you do it right, the pulling of the tweezers to make the basin of the corolla can also elongate the stem.  I forgot exactly how to do it, however, and my flower ended up mutant. Dave said I got it too hot.

It’s ugly, but I’ll still put it in the garden, probably tied to the grape arbor.

This is one of the cups that I made in the glassblowing class I took this spring.  One of my goals for the class was to make a cup that I could give to a friend, whose birthday was in early March.

I made these lines by trailing a stringer of light blue color around the circumference of a clear bubble.  Using a thin hook, I dragged the lines in opposite directions.  After straightening it back out, I finished the cup. The thicker blob of blue was from where the melted color first touched. (Should have gone further down the moil.)