The Satisfying Ancient Art Of Glassblowing Making A Murrine Vase Narrated Process

Hey everybody, welcome back to the studio. Today we have another marini piece for you. We've been making a lot of these lately on the channel. They're some of my favorite pieces to make. Each piece is always so special and they all come out looking completely different from the one before. But let's go ahead and get into the studio so we can go ahead and get started. So these are our marinis. They're small little discs. They almost look like casino chips. And what we're gonna do with them is we're gonna place them on the ceramic plate and then we're actually going to place them in a big oven called a garage. We'll let it sit in there for about an hour or maybe just a little bit more and let it get up to about a 1,000 degrees. You want to give these as much time as you can to prep. We're gonna be moving them into a bigger oven that's right around like 2,000 degrees, something like that. And so that transition can be a lot. So like I said, you want to make sure these things are nice and preheated before you move them over to the bigger oven. So now that these are preheating and we're also waiting on the glory hole to get hot, we can go ahead and start to set up the rest of the studio. Okay, so now these things are nice and hot and I'm actually going to use these big metal forks and we're gonna transfer them over to our glory hole like I was saying before. Now sometimes even when they're preheated, depending on how these are made and how they were cooled beforehand, they can start to break. So you always want to slowly kind of heat these up. You can see I'm kind of going in and out of here. I don't want to just plunge it in. So as these start to heat up even more, we're gonna have to come out and we're actually gonna have to rotate the plate 180 degrees. There's a burner on one side of that glory hole and it gets way too hot on that side of the plate if we don't flip it around. So every time we come out, we try to flip it and then we also will try to heat up the middle with this fluffy torch so that it all can squeeze at the same time and the edges don't get really flat whenever we start to push everything together. Now we can start the squeezing process. So I really want to try to minimize as many of these holes in between each of these little discs as I can. So we're gonna heat it up, flip it around again, and then we'll just continue to squeeze it down. So I passed our marinis off to Will and now I'm going to actually get a little bit of clear glass out of our furnace. This furnace is 2,000 degrees on the inside. It houses about 700 pounds of clear glass and we never turn it off unless we have to. So it stays on 24-7, 365. The plan with this glass is we're actually going to make what's called a collar. So I'm gonna blow a bubble out of the tip here in just a minute and then we're gonna melt away that bubble and we'll have a hole exposed. So this blowpipe is actually hollow on the inside. So it's designed we can blow through it and inflate what's ever on the end. So I took a measurement of how long the marinis are on the plate and I have a small amount of time to manipulate this glass to be just the right size so that I can roll the marinis up around it. So once my collar is the right size and Will tells me that the marinis are ready to go, we'll go for the roll-up. All right, so that was great. There's a little bit of a gap but that's okay because I really want to make sure that the pattern is flush. I want to make sure that these little pieces line up perfectly on the edges. We're gonna dust off any kiln wash that's left from the plate and then we're good to go. So now that everything's connected and it's somewhat cylindrical, we really want to try to minimize all of those gaps in between. So we're gonna use the marvering table to kind of shrink this down a little bit and get rid of any of those holes in between the marinis. So right now we've done a pretty good job at minimizing all of those little gaps, but you can see here there's a small flame that comes out when I shoot the fire in right there. So, you know, there's a small gap so we have a little bit more shrinking to do. So there's no more gaps and the last thing to do is we need to cap off the end. So Will's actually gonna go get a little bit of clear glass out of the furnace. He'll cut it off on the marver and then I'll use the clear glass as a cap to end the piece. So I prefer to use this clear cap on the end of the tube instead of just getting rid of the tip of the glass. You know, we could just cut off the end and it would encapsulate it, but that would mess with our pattern. So I really prefer to use this clear glass instead so we maintain our pattern. So if you've seen a lot of our videos you've seen me use this tool a lot, but for anyone new this is our newspaper tool. It's about 10 sheets of newspaper folded up and soaked in water and it lets me really control where the bubble is expanding. You can see Will is blowing into the pipe and I can cool it down in certain areas so it'll stop expanding there and it'll start expanding in the more heated up areas. Blow a little bit. Off. Yeah, it's wild. You know, I thought you were gonna say the opposite. I thought, uh, I thought you were gonna say it's the opposite because it was old how- The shower out in Pace was terrible. Ugh. Blow again? If I got in here and it felt like I was being hosed down at a- In jail or something? Yeah. Blow? Alright, off. Maybe that's why I like it so it reminds me of- Nice. Oh, no. Tis really takes me back. Takes me back to my days in the jail. Oh my god. Perfect. So now we've terminated all the clear glass and now we just need to blow it up a little bit. We want it to be a little bit bigger before we dip it back into the furnace to get our final layer of clear glass. Oh, that was on your bucket list? No, but I blew a lot of blow. Got some big dreams, my friend. Yeah, right there. I was gonna say, like, but I feel like I needed a bigger pipe if I was gonna get that actually. So now you can actually see the true color of the glass, you know. We have lots of whites and purples but everything looks really, really orange whenever it's on the end of the blow pipe, right? So we've cooled it down quite a bit because now we're gonna add that final layer of glass. It's good to have a cold core when you're gathering because, you know, you need something solid to collect on. If it was too hot then everything would start moving in there when I submerged it into the clear glass. But now I'm gonna come on out with that extra layer of glass and I'll hold the pipe vertically and strip off any extra glass that we don't need. Like a perfect squeeze. Would you look at that? All right, sweet. This thing's looking great. And that's our final layer of glass, like I said. So from here on out, we're just going to be inflating it and turning it into its final shape. You can blow a little bit. Oh, burning my hand. Hot spot steam? Oh, no, it's just water. You can blow. All right, off. Turn, turn, turn. Got it, got it, got it. All right, blow a little bit. You need, like, grip tape here. Yeah. Can you blow again? Yep. All right, off. I would love to put duct tape on that. All right, we will go with... My jack line kind of got lost. That's okay. Yeah, I got you a little... I was a little too high. No, it's okay. It was very easy to grab. So we've got some pretty good volume out of this thing and those windows are really starting to blow up. The center is a really dark purple that's transparent and then the outer ring around it is like a kind of... I think it's called opal violet. So it's kind of just like an opaque purple. But now we're going to move on to the cork paddles because I want this to be a flat piece. So Will's going to rotate the pipe back and forth for me and I'm going to start to slowly kind of flatten it. I'd say my default is I'm capping. Every once in a while, I'll let my finger off. Let's do that again. I love this shot so much. It looks so good right here. You can really see the transparency in all those windows. You get all the canes and stuff. I think this thing is looking great so far. But now we need to set up for the punty transfer. So we're actually going to start to heat up the bottom of the piece a little bit and we're going to start to make it nice and flat so that it'll have a nice flat spot to sit on when we're done. So this transfer I was talking about, we're basically going to take another pipe here in a minute. Will will take another pipe. He'll gather a little bit of clear glass on it and then we're going to end up stabbing it onto the bottom right where I have my little metal Taglio tool right here. And that's going to be the bottom of the piece. So we're going to disconnect it from the blow pipe that it's on right now and then we'll have it flipped over on the new pipe and I can actually use my tools to open up the lip of it to its final shape. So we're going to stab this thing on. I want it to be right in the middle so everything's nice and symmetrical. You know, if I put it on too far to the left or the right, then when I rotate this thing, we're not going to have the symmetry that I want. So this part is really paramount. It's really important that you get it almost bullseye right in the middle. And you only have a small amount of time before that clear glass kind of locks up. So you really want to make sure you get it right the first time. Now here in just a moment, I'm actually going to add some water to that little line that we put in earlier with our jacks. That's where we're going to disconnect it from the pipe. So we'll add some water. We'll lift the pipe up. I'll give it a little tap and we should disconnect it without any extra cracks. All right, we're going to go for it. Ready? All right, so that transfer went great. My jack line was a little bit wider than I wanted. You see, I have a pretty big hole at the top, which isn't super preferable. I should have gotten that down a little bit more. But now we're going to work on trimming the lip of the piece. So I want it to be a little bit taller. And what we're going to do is we're going to heat up the lip and I'll use my tweezers to start to slowly pull it out longer and longer. All right, sweet. So we've tweezed the thing out pretty big. But like I said before, it's pretty wide, which isn't super preferable. So what you're going to see is it's going to start to fold in on me a little bit whenever I try to put this new kind of jack line in there so we can break off the kind of scalloped lip on there. So ideally, this is a lot smaller. It's not as wide. And it would be much easier to control if it was that way. So, you know, you always learn from your mistakes and stuff. I make a lot of these marini pieces, but there's always things you can do better. So now I'm going to slowly start to kind of put in another line right here with my jacks. And then you'll see me get outside of the bench, actually. And I'll use my diamond shears to try to clamp it down a little bit and maybe pull it a little bit longer. Awesome. Yeah, take a flash. We'll do that again. What do you think? You want to take a flash? Yeah. Take a flash. Now that we've got this thing down, we're going to give it a little tap. We'll get rid of all that extra glass. All right. Awesome. So nothing broke there except for the pieces that we wanted to, which is always a good thing. And now we're going to just worry about opening the lip. And we'll basically be done. All right, guys. And now the piece is basically done. But we're not exactly out of the woods yet. You know, the last thing we have to do is disconnect it from the pipe. And we need to transfer it into one of our annealers, which is basically like a kiln. And it'll be able to cool overnight. This thing cools over about a period of about 12 hours. So Will has some Kevlar gloves on. He's got a welder's jacket on and some face protection. And what we're going to do is he's going to grab the piece. I'll put some water on the connection point that I want it to break at. And then we'll tap the pipe. And it should pop off right into his gloves. There's no water in the thing. And here's the final piece. I think it looks great. I love these windows. I can't wait to experiment more with these things. I just love the look of it. The canes are something that I've done a lot in the past. So I'm super familiar with that. But the windows look so good. And guys, this piece is available for purchase. If you want to find it, you can find a link to it in the description box down below. Thanks for watching, y'all. Be safe out there, and we'll catch you in the next one.