Class Day Three - Rings and Pizza

Third day of class - half through now. I'm trying to remind myself that we still have three more days. What a great day! We started out with demos by Lucio. He showed us how to make several different versions of angel wings. My only attempt cracked but it was still good practice. In the afternoon, Diego (Lucio's apprentice) showed us how to make glass rings. So simple once you master it but difficult to get the heat just right. One thing that is something that a beginner (like me) just doesn't get right away, it the amount of heat and cooling that it takes to get the glass to pull out in one fluid motion while keeping its shape - PPP (practice, practice, practice!).

Tonight we went to dinner on another island and we took three boats. One belonged to the shop assistant, Diego. When I saw it, the thought - "jalopy" - automatically came to mind. There was a raging thunderstorm while we were at the restaurant and when we came out, the nice boats with covers were dry and poor Diego was left bailing water out of his boat. We had a good laugh at his expense. Dinner was fantastic and it poured rain and thundered and lightning-ed (is that a word?) through dinner and we worried we'd have to take a (water) taxi back. By the time we'd had our Tiramisu and espresso though, it was fairly dry and other than Diego's boat situation, we got "home" without incident.

The rings are in the annealer so I'll have a few pix of them tomorrow. Today, here are a couple of pictures of the angel wings - first by Lucio




And now - my cracked attempt (basically, I cut the wings apart too close to the back which caused stress in the glass - I like the torso though) -Finally, a picture of Diego showing us all how to do rings -