My good friend, Karen Bingham, and I have decided to choose activities we both enjoy to celebrate our birthdays. Over the past few years we have gone to the temple, out to lunch, hiking through Red Butte Garden and to an Indigo Girl’s concert.
Most of those fabulous suggestions have been Karen’s and I have felt a bit like a slacker because I haven’t had too many great ideas.
But this year, I rocked.
We headed to the Art Institute located at Thanksgiving Point to sculpt glass.
We were both pretty excited for the experience.
There are three furnaces which heat up to over 2,000 degrees each, so it was pretty toasty in the work room.
Our first task was to select the colors we wanted, which was a little tricky, because they look different in the powdered form than they do when they are melted in the glass.
Next, we put on gloves and waited for our “instructor” to pull a blob of molten glass out of the first furnace,
heat it up even more in the second furnace,
then add the powdered color.
Then he brought it back to us where we had to roll it and keep it moving so it wouldn’t melt into a form we didn’t want.
Then we filed one end flat, and used the tongs to start pulling out the pedals on our would-be flowers.
After stretching out the stem and either leaving is straight or curly, they clipped them off and fired the end to smooth it out.
It finally went into the third furnace, which would slowly lose 100 degrees every hour over the following 24 hours until the glass was cool enough to handle.
And the final product looked like this:
Go ahead. Tell me you wouldn’t pay good money for one of those.
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