Corning Glass Museum 2016!

Back from teaching at Corning at the " The Studio" !

The 6 days at Corning museum studio was a whirlwind experience. The facilities are great, the assistants are on the ball and having my personal assistant and friend Peg Zglass from Rochester helping throughout the courses is something I could really get used to 😀 I have to add we had a fantastic group of ladies, (sorry that not all were on this photo 2 are missing) that makes for an even better experience. There were also so many added activities throughout the week.

There were 3 other teachers at the studio this week, Nathan Sandberg, he was teaching Vitrigraph cane making something I had just recently heard about and was quite interested in, so it was so cool that it happened to be taught the week I was teaching too! I obviously popped into their class to take a look at how it is done. I just imagine making hollow beads with the cane, although I would do it on a smaller scale and not make quite so much cane in one pull.
The cool thing was that one of the students prepared some fused small plates for me to play with and I made some beads from it. Although this is not something new as a process for me, I like the vitrigraph

Image of vitrigraph bowls from Nathan Sandberg

One of the hollow beads I made with the vitrigraph murrini 

cane it reminded me of how very similar cane is pulled from polymer clay, were all the layers in the cane are extruded and form different patterns on the inside.

Then there was Pablo Soto, a glass blower, amazing glass he creates. I did not have the opportunity to watch him work though.

 Link to corning website to view the 3 of us..

We had the opportunity to take a guided tour with William Gundenrath from Corning studio, a glassblower and historian. It brought the old techniques to life and it was so interesting to go through the some of the processes involved throughout the ages.

I also had to give a presentation of my work, first time that I did that and I opted to go first! Not because I was so brave, but I did not want to be intimidated by the " Boys" ;)
It was a good experience :)

I also took the photography session, and got a good tip on how to set the lighting on my camera. he was delighted to see that I have a Sony so he new where to find the tools to show me what I could do. My camera has a great function where I can aim it on the background and it measures the Kelvin and adjusts the image to get the correct light colour. Definitely will be using that!

We also listened to a lecture on wholesale selling and pricing your work, not something I do but always good to listen.

All in all we had a great time together and it was a wonderful experience for me to be able to teach there.
I got the T shirt now, for real :)  and on the back it has all the teachers names that have taught at Corning the last 20 years...and now I am on it too :))

Thank you Amy Schwarz (Director of education at Corning Studio) and team for making this possible.