Blowing Pittsburgh Glass Center Away

We finished up our week long trip exploring glass and ceramics at the Pittsburgh Glass Center. There we were able to watch skilled artisans make glass art and blow our own glass art creations. This was a great culmination to our trip as we go to create glass ornaments in any color combination we chose.

Mural on the outside of the Glass Center

There were many colors of frit that could be chosen for our ornaments

Kelly provides the blowing power for Bekka's ornament.

Glass artists adhere a new glob of molten glass to hone the bottom of the ornament

A speckled ornament that is being blown

A new piece of glass is pulled into a handle to hang the ornament

In addition to the glass blowing studio, there is also an art gallery with various models and glass creations. The above piece shows how detailed and lifelike pieces can be designed. The inspiration for the show were models of cells and other microscopic organisms that glass artists created before powerful microscopes were readily available to scientists.

Questions:
1. You see Kelly and Bekka blow an orb or glass ball ornament above. How do you believe the art piece above was created?
2. Why would glass models be useful to scientists?

Phipps Conservatory

Our second trip of the day saw us visit the Phipps Conservatory of Pittsburgh. Phipps houses botanical gardens spanned several continents and included a butterfly exhibit.

Beautiful orchids

Wonderland display of glass figures 

A butterfly in the conservatory

Thaw by the Pittsburgh Glass Center depicts a glass woolly mammoth skeleton

Desert flower

Celadon and Royal Purple Gilded Fiore Dale Chihuly

Question:
1. Chihuly and other artists glass sculptures are on display in the conservatory. What are some other non-traditional places that you can imagine glass art being displayed?

Carnegie: Hero or Villain

We visited the Carnegie Natural Science and Art Museums today. As we have studied, they were endowed by Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnet from the Guilded Age. Carnegie made his money building a trust that kept wages low and crushed his competition. He eventually sold his steel company to J. P. Morgan for $408 Million.  With the fortune he made from his business he built many libraries,  Carnegie Hall, founded the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Institution for Science, Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, Carnegie Hero Fund, Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

A plea to patrons to give to the museum to continue its mission.

A prehistoric exhibit in the natural history museum.

Modern Zombie art: can you tell which are zombies?

Carnegie Music Hall

Water Lilies by Claude Monet

A few pieces of glass art on display

Question:
After reviewing the links to the philanthropic organizations Carnegie endowed and reviewing how he made that money answer the following question: Was Andrew Carnegie a hero or a villain. Justify your answer.

Hello Pittsburgh!

Our final destination Thursday was Pittsburgh, Pa and Station Square. Station Square celebrates Pittsburgh's past and serves as a place to gather with friends or make new ones. I was blessed to be there with my Cabell County friends and we had a good time geocaching, talking and of course, eating.

A retired Bessemer Converter on Station Square

Two of my partners in crime, Dan and Steve!

A view of a bridge over the Monongahela River

Dan and Steve search for a geocache

Lungs of a blast furnace

A car on the Monongahela Incline

Upon return to our hotel we were treated with a sighting of the world famous Oscar Mayer Weinermobile!

Goodbye Oglebay, Hello Mosser Glass

Thursday saw us leave Oglebay and head for our new home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. On the way we stopped at Mosser Glass in Cambridge, Ohio and saw a different kind of glass factory.

The morning at Oglebay provided a lot of fog which lent itself well to me capturing sun flare!

A gather boy collects a large ball of molten glass on the end of the pipe.

The molten glass is then cut precisely as to fill the glass mold.

A large lever is then compressed by hand to push the glass into the mold and form the glass pitcher.

The worker must exact the proper amount of pressure to ensure the glass fully fills the mold.

A carry boy then takes the glass for final preparation.

After three hours in the annealing oven the glassware is ready to be sold.

While they only had two lines running on our visit, they have many molds they have made or acquired from other companies over their more than 30 year history.

Questions:
1. Compare and contrast the three different ways we have observed glass collected and processed in glass making (Blenko, Wismach and Mosser).
2. Are there any advantages or disadvantages you see for any of the three processes?

Hot Trip to Homer Laughlin

As Tony Cavalier is fond of saying, today was hazy, hot and humid. We started our day with a trip to The Museum of Ceramics in East Liverpool, Ohio. What we found was the history of ceramics in northern West Virginia, primarily Homer Laughlin and its subsidiaries.

Until modern times, pottery and ceramics were hand spun on a wheel as Chris is demonstrating here.

This is an original and complete set of Homer Laughlin Fiesta Dinnerware.

A display in the museum of a family throwing clay and creating china.

A reenactment of a sagger carrying china on his head to the kiln.

Betsy Chetwynd of the Ceramics Museum giving us the history of the pieces on display.

A display of ceramic mugs from a barber shop. Barber shops were the center of a town's life through the mid-Twentieth Century. Regular customers often had their own personalized  shaving mugs. 

After the museum we took a trip to Homer Laughlin, home of Fiesta Dinnerware. While there we toured the factory and saw how china is made. A video is linked here that shows the process in the 1930's. While it is more modernized and mechanized today, the process remains the same.

Questions:
1. Jiggers and others in ceramics manufacturing worked piecework. What do you think piecework means?
2. The picture above shows an entire family working to make china. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of using an entire family?
3. Look around your house and talk to you guardians. Ask them where they use china and if they have any Fiesta Dinnerware.

Marble King

Marble King, also located in Paden City,  was the second stop of the day and proved to be a lot of fun. We learned about the process of making marbles (unfortunately their operation was down) and got to learn about how Marble King has adapted and changed in its more than 100 history.

The oven that Mable King uses to make its marbles. It was engineered by students from WVU.

While this is a picture of Wismach, they send the cullet from their factory to Marble King.

A barrel of black marbles.

Beri Fox, President of Marble King discussing how they are using marbles today and how they are keeping the age old game of shooting marbles alive.

A recent news article about the annual marble shooting competition sponsored by Marble King in New Jersey.

Paul Wissmach Glass

We started day two at Paul Wissmach Glass in Paden City, West Virginia. Wissmach makes colored glass sheets for artists to use in stained glass and other application.

Carry boys use trolleys to scoop ladles of molten glass. Two ladles are used in each pour. Each ladle comes out of a different comes from a different batch of glass.

The molten glass is mixed together into one molten mass.

The molten glass then goes through rollers, much like a pasta machine, and then is formed into a sheet of glass floating on the table.

Molten glass on the table being rolled out.

Within seconds a worker runs a metal knife under the glass to separate it from the table and pushes it into the annealing oven.

Cooled sheets of stained glass exiting the annealing oven and ready to be cut.

Part of Wissmach's inventory of glass. They have over 5000 colors in their inventory.

Questions:
 1. The chemistry of glass making is the same, but the process is different from what we have studied before with blowing glass. Compare and contrast Wissmach and Fenton.
2. What are some places you have seen stained glass before?
3. What are some other uses you can imagine for stained glass?