Art of the egg
Glass eggs find their way into Easter baskets
The Easter Bunny has nothing on the artisans at the Pittsburgh Glass Center, where students learned to make colorful glass eggs tocelebrate the upcoming holiday.
The nonprofit center on Penn Avenue in Garfield hosted a series of egg-making courses, where students learned how to shape molten glass and make a sculpted glass egg.
Teaching the class was Chris Hofmann, lead instructor at the center, which has educated more than 20,000 visitors with events, classes and exhibitions for more than15 years.
The center also highlights the history of glass making in the Pittsburgh region, which was once known more for its glass production rather than steel at the turn of the last century.
In the early 1900s, there were more than 150 glass factories in Western Pennsylvania, and by 1920, Pittsburgh was producing 80 percent of the glass made in the United States.
Mr. Hofmann, 33, of Bloomfield, has been teaching at the center for eight years, including the glass egg class, which has soared in popularity.
The center sponsored dozens of egg-themed classes this season, and all were sold out, including “Make-it-Now” workshops that give students a quick 20minute tutorial on glass-making.
“We’ve been making eggs for a few years now,” he said.
Kim Conrad of New Kensington was among a handful of students who attended a recent class.
“I love this place. I could practically live here,” said Ms. Conrad, who signed up for two other classes during the same day, along with the sculpted glass egg class.
Ms. Conrad said she got hooked on the process when she took an eight-week class at the center, making a variety of glass pieces.
“I love working with glass,” she said.
Mr. Hofmann, who has honed his trade over the years with a fine art degree from the Columbus College of Art and Design, explains how the process begins with the2,130-degree furnace.
“This is a get-your-feet-wet experience,” he explains to the adult students. The class is open to anyone over the age of 14.
He uses a long steel pole —called a punty — to gather a small knob of honey-like glass from the furnace. Since students will be shaping the glass, they use the punties. If they were learning to blow glass, the implement would bea hollow pipe.
He hands the punty off to Ms. Conrad, who must continually turn the device to keep the glass from dripping off. She dips the glass into a bowl of colored silica — different oxides produce different colored glass.
For example, green is produced with chromium and iron, while selenium or cadmium produces red, orange and yellow.
Ms. Conrad makes a purple, teal and white sculpture by using silica made of manganese and copper.
After it is shaped with tools and gravity, the sculpture — still on the punty — goes back into the furnace to gather another glass knob that will serve as the clear outer shell.
The 1,000-pound oven is one of two melting furnaces at the center that run 24 hours a day. Cooling down the natural gas-powered furnace could crack it.
The center also has eight reheating furnaces, which are kept at a constant 3,000degrees along with annealing ovens that slowly cool down the creations to keep them from cracking or exploding. It takes about 12 to 18 hours to cool down an item such as the sculpted eggs, Mr. Hofmann said, so students can’t take their art homewith them right away.
Students learn how to shape their eggs, using a variety of tools, such as thongs, hammers and a wooden block used for smoothing and shaping the surface. A small torch is used to remove any bits of glass that remain, and the finished egg is placed on a spatula to createa flat bottom.
The eggs can be used as paperweights, but most of the students said they planned to give theirs away as Easter gifts.
“I’ll probably end up giving mine to my mom,” said Alex Rowland of Wilkinsburg, who attended the class with friend Dan Meehan of Lawrenceville.
Ms. Conrad said she, too, planned to gift the egg to her mom. And, she plans to come back to the center for more classes.
“I just think it’s a beautiful art form,” Ms. Conrad said. “This place is so cool. They offer a lot to artists and the community.”
For more information, visit https://www.pittsburghglasscenter. or call 412-365-2145.