If you’ve recently moved to Seattle, you might not know that the city is the glass art capital of the U.S. It’s true — way back in the 1970s, Dale Chihuly established the Pilchuck Glass School, which attracted aspiring glassblowers, and those students soon seeded the region with glass art studios and schools. You can take advantage of this scene in a couple of different ways. You can drop in to one of the many shops that sell glass art, or you can make some yourself.
It’s not as intimidating as it sounds, explains Paul Schuster, the gallery manager of Seattle Glassblowing Studio. At this Belltown space, students can take courses in the “Foundations of Glassblowing,” a multi-week set of classes that starts at $1,260, but you don’t need much training to get on the hot shop floor — for just $160, you can spend 30 minutes with a studio staff member making a cup, bowl, or paperweight.
These sessions start with a safety talk (duh), followed by the instructor handing students some glass from the furnace along with “frit,” colored glass that students roll together using the “punty,” or pole, before putting it into the 2,200-degree oven (“glory hole,” glassblowers love their lingo), which heats the glass enough so it can be shaped using a variety of tools. It’s a simple enough process, Schuster says, that some couples do it on a date night. Some companies bring employees in for team-building exercises, sometimes with catered food or even an open bar. It’s a much more casual experience than the phrase “2,200-degree oven” would make you think.
All these “experiences,” as Schuster calls them, are one-on-one interactions with a studio staff member. While the staffer helps the newbie glassblower, the goal is to get the student to do as much of the glass-making process themselves.
Not everyone is going to get so fired up (pun intended) about glassblowing that they want to make it their life. Most people who come through Seattle Glassblowing Studio just leave with a little glass object they made — plus a newfound respect for glass art. That way, when someone steps out of the hot shop having struggled through making a Christmas ornament, Paul says, “They're immediately more impressed by the glass we have here in our art gallery. Like, ‘How do they do that?’”
