Bart Bear's Blog

No doubt about Mum. She is always learning new things, and most of them are fun. Last weekend she started to learn how to make things from glass. There is this place called Canberra Glassworks in a big building that used to be the power station for Canberra. Now it is full of workshops, furnaces, ovens and all the sorts of tools that glassworkers need. You can go along and sign up for classes and actually make things. Mum started out by making a paperweight. She had to get a big blob of melted glass out of a furnace onto the end of a pipe, then roll it in coloured glass powder, heat it all up again so that the colours melted into the blob and stir and twist the colours with grabby things. Then, with some help from the teacher, she blew through the pipe and rolled the coloured blob around in a shaper until it was round, cut the round thing off and sat it in another small blob of melted glass. Then it had to go into a special oven and cool down really slowly. We picked the paperweight up yesterday. It looks great. With the clear top and insides, the blue hazy outsides, and the yellow streaky bits, it is a bit like a tiny frozen aquarium. I like it a lot and will keep all of my special papers under it. After all, Mum must have made it for me, don't you reckon?

Labels: Canberra, craft