This summer K and I visited Oregon. We were there for a couple of different reasons, but the best part was visiting K’s brother, his wife and their two year old. J, the wife and I have WAY to damned much fun going to all the local(ish) yarn and fabric stores, and this visit J booked for us to go to a glass blower and actually make something ourselves. J knows I have an obsession with pumpkins, seriously I have about 50 of them, and she knew I had always wanted to try my hand at glass blowing, so this was the perfect activity for us.

When their daughter was born I visited so I could help then with their new, and first child. K and I are their "the worse thing that could happen to our niece” people, and J really wanted to make sure I was there for her birth, so if we had to step in to care for her, I was there as a part of her birth. Isn’t that freaking sweet and brilliant? Yeah I thought so too. We kind of planned to do the glass thing then, but she ended up needing a C-section (not really, but that’s her story) and obviously wasn’t up to doing it.

I think that if we had done any of the other two “classes” which were much simpler, we might have been able to do more on our pumpkins because we’d have known more. I suspect that those two classes allow you to do more stuff, but I don’t know for sure.

Ultimately what we got to do was keep the glass moving when it went back in the glory hole to warm back up, roll the pre-pumpkin gather of frit and blow into the tube to blow into the glass. That was about it, but really how cool is that? If K and I get another chance to visit before they move, I’d like to go back and do one of the other classes. The one with the green stem is mine. They accidentally sent me both pumpkins and J got to go back and make another, which I think was a good ending anyway because her second one was WAY better. I do have a video of me making my pumpkin, if I can figure out how to tag it into this post I will.