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HAPPINESS: is to have EVERYTHING you NEED
not the NEED to have EVERYTHING.
5.19 This is our second field trip in the last 22 months. We are joined by Abby and beau Michael.
This is a self guided tour, and, as such, it’s like walking through a museum. Below are just a small sampling of the many beautiful glass creations at Chihuly; Enjoy.
Above is a ceiling arrangement. not an easy picture to take. Actually Abby took many of these pictures, feels like old times.
It only took us about an hour to complete the tour when we came upon a video on the art of glass blowing. This should really be at the beginning of the tour, not the end. We never did finish the video since it was time for us to leave the studio and proceed across the street, to experience the actual process itself.
Below is one of the Chihuly work stations, but I sure it’s not where all the big stuff is created.
These two guys below, names I’ve forgotten, will demonstrate how to turn liquid glass into a piece of beauty. These guys, lets call the Blue and Grey, are working with two ovens. Blue is in the first which has a temp of over 2300 degrees and behind him with a grey door you see the second oven with a temp of 2000 degrees. It’s difficult to see clearly, but on that white marble slab are 12-15 glass rods with a strand of red in them.
Above Blue has heated those twelve inch glass rods and rolled them up and around a chunk of molten glass from the back oven. This oven has a constant supply of molten glass available to be worked into a new creation. After about ten minutes he has the colored glass rods in an almost perfectly round design. Back, centuries ago, the iron table top used to be a three or four inch slab of marble, but that was then. 
The red molten material in the center are the glass rods. The guys will continue to stretch and twist this material for as long as they feel they need. I think we were expecting to see a flower creation, or vase but not to be. Instead we saw the creation of a glass stalk, as seen below. In the next several days they will be adding to this stalk other things of beauty and stick them to this stalk.
Being seniors we we’re hungry, so we found a grilled cheese joint, which was very good.