Remember my post about an obsession…oh I mean…collection of Celestial Spheres from Glass Eye Studio? Then, I am sure you can imagine how excited I was when they recently invited me to their studio for a tour and to actually make a glass piece; an absolutely incredible opportunity and an amazing experience. I wanted to photograph the intricate process and art that goes into it, so I had my husband be the one who made the actual piece (that and I’m such a chicken…the glass is 2100 degrees!)

All of the craftsmen at Glass Eye Studios are extremely skilled and talented artisans. The craftsman that walked us through the process and helped us through each step of creating our piece, has been there for over 26 years. As their head glass maker, he is in charge of several people, about a dozen when we were there. He shared with us not only his time, but his knowledge and experience. It was interesting that he had first gone to school to become a doctor and later ended up a glass craftsman…both of which require working with your hands and a great deal of skill and stamina.

The process begins with a steel rod that is heated up and placed into the giant oven to collect some molten glass material. Because of the intense heat, you then quickly cool the rod with a water spray. Keep in mind, you have to constantly turn the rod to keep the glass centered since it has the consistency of liquid honey. For our rather simple piece, you add color by rolling it in the selected color material (I wanted blue and pink – Add to Heart colors). For many of their other pieces, the process is much more complex and can require up to 4 craftsman to work on a single piece. So you can see that after color is added, it needs to be re-heated, and then the other color added.

Once the colors are incorporated, more clear glass material needs to be added to the piece, which is then shaped, heated, shaped, and so on. Special tools are used to manipulate the glass on the rod, from adding bubbles to shaping the glass in specific ways. The glass can be cooled with compressed air, to speed up certain processes. The glass will be reheated as necessary, or more glass material added depending on the size you are going after.

Directly below are the hands of the head glass maker helping to roll the rod while my husband was learning how to use some of the tools. To the right a photo of one of the other makers using another tool to flatten the glass. Once a piece is finished, it will sit on the auto-rollers until it cools slightly and then it goes through a special curing process. After a certain amount of time it is then taken to the cool room where it is ground and polished to a finished piece. Those pieces then go through a quality check and those that pass are stored in their warehouse. We also got a sneak peek at a product in development…I can’t say what it is, but I can tell you I’ve never seen anything like it and looking forward to adding it to our collection.

As far as our paperweight goes, it still needed to go through the annealing oven and the cool room. We are very much looking forward to seeing the finished piece next week. I’ll be sure to share a photo of course

As the last photo shows, although there is certainly consistency within a product, each piece is hand crafted and one of a kind. A tremendous amount of skill and time goes into each and every piece. Truly, this is art. I feel extremely fortunate to have been able to see this in person and am so very grateful for the unique experience Glass Eye Studio has added to my own heart.