my partner went to take weekend glassblowing class at corning and i tagged along

(it was an encalmo workshop, for making a piece using two colors. semi-relatedly, i didn’t realize that colors affect the CTE, coefficient of thermal expansion, of the glass)

(that corning museum picture for explaining encalmo is a bit confusing, plates are made by spinning a cylinder of glass real fast and the glass centrifuges outward, so in that picture precision join is the center line between the inner and outer colors on the plate. err. maybe this a better picture maybe, where they kept it in cylinder form)

corning is about a 5 hr drive from boston, ma

we went to watkins glen state park ny first. (trying to go to cow cuddle but we would have had to set out at 7am, not 10am)

it has about a 1.5 hr loop to see a bunch of waterfalls, easy (mostly flat and paved). As it rained recently, the path was pretty full of puddles and there was spray from the waterfall. (we did have to walk past a misleading “DANGER do not enter” door — it’s actually open when ajar, if it were closed they would padlock it with chain). perhaps $10 for parking and we got a map which did come in handy.

Notes for next time: a former roommate also recommended Aunt Sarah’s Falls and Shequaga Falls Park which are a short drive (~5 mins) and visible from the parking lot. we were tired so we went to just aunt sarah’s, which, make sure to go to the “aunt sarah’s parking lot” on google maps not “aunt sarah’s falls”.

The next day we went to the Corning Glass Museum, which had both historical glass through the ages as well as an innovation section about the industrial change and technological advances in glass. The uses of glass are intense, not just windowshields and tupperware, but also fiber optics, telescopes, even missile heads.

Modern glassblowing for art does not look so different.

(click to embiggen)

Once i get my phone back i’ll post about what i learned second hand about glassblowing with some short videos.