Is Glassblowing School Necessary?

Transcript

Hi, my name is Ed Donovan I'm here at DC GlassWorks. You can find us at dcglassworks.com. We are a public access glass blowing facility, we also do metal and metal-casting and welding. We are primarily a teaching facility. We want to share with people the magic of glass blowing. It is an amazing substance and today I'm gonna be talking to you about glass-blowing. So do you need to go to class or glass-blowing school in order to be a glass blower? Yeah, kind of. Um, there's not a lot of common sources of information for glass and it's certainly not a natural material to work with. It's blazing hot. Um, it takes, uh, a little bit of information to get to know the material. You want some tricks. You want some tips, um, from an instructor. Regardless of whether it's a university or a more informal setting like we provide here at DC GlassWorks, uh, you don't have to spend a lot of money learning how to blow glass, uh, but you definitely want somebody sharing with you the ideas that make glass blowing the very basic understood - the basic understandings you want to get from somebody. Uh, trying to figure it out on your own would be really prohibitively expensive. Um, it would take you quite a bit of time and I think you would get very frustrated, uh, not having any idea of what you're supposed to be doing. Uh, so just even just a six-week basic course or, uh, we offer weekend workshops, in which we teach you the basics. After that, you can come in and experiment; have fun with it. It's an amazing material. Um, you don't have to learn a whole lot from a university or a structured course, but it's really important to get the very basics so you have an understanding of how to use the tools; how to use the glory hole; how to use all of the varying things that make glass blowing possible. Um, I think without that basic knowledge you'd be kinda lost.