Better late than never (I guess). Tonight we are showing some new styles of work we have done, plus some of the other styles we've done in the past, this time only BIGGER. DEAN-LIVELY ART GALLERY at 16 N. Broadway in Edmond, OK 5 pm - 8 pm.
Thanks for the nice words. The individual cups were blown out on another day beforehand. When doing the cups, I would blow out 5-7 cups at once out of the same stuff. Like, if I wanted a transparent sea green cup with light green cane, I would start by picking up a chunk of sea green rod, get a couple of gathers over it, then pick up the light green cane. Then I would blow it out and stretch it out until it was long enough to start making 5- 7 cups out of that one thing. Then I would repeat the process several times for other combinations. Then, when I had the right combinations I would pick the cups I wanted and heat them to about 1050-1100 degrees, pick them up and add them in whatever order I wanted. The exception to that is the first cup, which I do on the spot for the piece I am about to make. Then I start adding the other previously made cups till I get enough. Then I change the axis and blow out the piece. I don't have a lot of other pics right now of the process. Just took those hurriedly with my cell phone while blowing.
Here are a few pics of an incalmo piece with 7 incalmo cups and ultimately a change of axis.
Here's a newer photo of our Glass Studio at night with the flowers grown up a little better.
We are honored that one of our beautiful fluted bowls, a Cerulean Blue with light blue accent, were choosen to present to our Lt. Governor, Jari Askins at the monthly AICCO meeting at the Meinders School of Business at Oklahoma City University. The accompanying photograph shows (beginning on the left) Micah McGahan, Lt. Gov. Jari Askings, myself-Chris McGahan, and Philip Busey Jr. at the presentation.
I thought I had these in the blog, but after a quick look, I didn't see them. Here's Bella Forte in the day, (I'm getting ready to go into the studio - note the killer Chihuahuas) and here's Bella Forte at Night. Looks kinda Thomas Kincadeish doesn't it? Click on each picture for a bigger look.
It's been a while since I've had time to post anything. I can't remember when I've been busier. Haven't worked out in over 2 weeks. (I can tell it, unfortunately) First, I want to say how nice it was to have Karl and Bill over to the studio again, and it was so nice to meet the guests they brought along. Dr. Long, Dr. Moore, Dr. Horstmanshof, and his wife. We had a great time enjoyed their company. Looking forward to doing it again. Also yesterday we were glad to meet Judy and Susan that drove up from Ardmore. Very nice folks.
Back to the reticello. We tried reticello for the first time yesterday. Very difficult to do unless you are Dante Marioni and Janusz Pozniak working together. They make it look easy these days. Well anyway, here's a photo of our first attempt. Not too bad for a first try. I know we will get better at it with practice. That's the way it always works. The piece is slightly over 16 1/2" tall and 9" wide.
We were commissioned to blow 30 bowls for a corporate leadership team. Then an additional bowl for a commemorative gift to a high ranking govt. offical. So a total of 31 bowls. Here's a few photos of the bowls we were commissioned to make for a leadership team of a top organization. (A few of the photos of individual bowls were taken in an isolated setting.)
The First photo shows one of the blue tone on tone bowls.
The second photo shows the interaction of a different bowl with light and the background of it's surroundings. I love the reflection of light the bowls give off!!
The third photo is a different tone on tone blue bowl.
The fourth photo is of the bowls in the corporate conference room on the huge granite table.
The fifth photo is a different view on the same table.
The sixth photo is the bowls on the gorgeous lawn outside Bella Forte Glass Studio.
We have 2 more to blow, which we will do Saturday and the project will be completed ahead of the deadline which is the coming Monday. We had less than 2 weeks to get this far from the initial mention by our client. Yeah, that means we did good!
This color combination is one of my favorites and to top it off, this bowl fluted out in a really nice and unique way. It stands about 9 inches high and almost 17 inches at its widest part.
We had a great group of folks come out and watch us blow glass yesterday! Roger brought a group out to eat at the restaurant then come over to the glass studio and watch the action there for about 3 hours. We all had a great time! Here's one of the things we blew. It is a multi-cane vase. It stands about 9 1/2" tall and has canes that are "amethyst blue", "gold"(not pure gold-just the color gold), "blue", and "green". It turned out wonderful!!! I'm glad they got to watch us make it. Here's a few pictures of it.
It turned out pretty decent. Not perfect, but pretty good for a first time. We will work toward perfecting it.
We continued on today with something new. If it turns out decent, I will post photograph/s tomorrow. It looked very promising when we put it in the annealer. Sometimes with something new, there are so many things to watch and moderate over I might have overlooked something that didn't look right. Right now, I am cautiously excited!
Here's something new we tried yesterday and just got out of the annealer today. It's a five piece incalmo. It's the first time we have ever tried incalmo, and we did five of them. Very pleased with our first one. I know they will get better with practice. It's 23" tall before cold working. The four incalmo cups are in the annealer before we start. The 5th one was already on the pipe. The middle picture is before it was blown out. It looks pretty cool like that.
Well, we finally did it! We were shooting for a "Raffinato" style piece of 30" in the "perfect world", 27" up to 30" in the "normal world". We were about 29 1/4" before cold working. We ended up with 28" exactly. Not the 30" but close. Actually we were over 31" before we transfered. Our glory hole is only 24-26" deep. We had to keep 3 torches on it to keep it from cracking. (You can see the picture) This was our third attempt. We (Micah, Krista, and I) had glass on the pipe about 3 1/2 hours with about 1 hour prep time before that. I would say for where we are now, a 28" finished piece is about 10 times harder than a 15"-16" piece. As we progress, I know that will change. After that we blew a 16" piece and that used to be stressful. No stress. It felt like nothing on the end of the pipe. we guess the finished piece weighs between 12 and 13 pounds. Doesn't sound like much weight, but wait until you get that stretched out 30' on the end of the blow pipe with a thick moile, and the glass moving. Anyway, we want to thank Roy for helping (actually he did it and we barely helped him) cold work the piece! Roy did a great job! Roy, you the MAN! Here are a few pictures.
Karl, if you are following my blog, this will be of interest to you. For everyone else here's the scoop. Karl came into the restaurant in February looking for some glass and commissioned one of our multicolored raffinato pieces. He needed it to be as large as we could get it to be to fit the scale of his house. (big house!) He wanted the vase 30" tall. I told him, we never had done one that big before, but I knew we could eventually get it done. Since some of our operation is outside we try to avoid blowing some things when its cold for obvious reasons. We had some cold spells and wet spells and knowing we needed something bigger than we ever had blown before we waited for a better weather. Finally an almost decent day came and we started. The piece got too cold and cracked before we could even transfer. I figured out that in addition to needing a warmer day than what we had, we also needed a second large hand torch. I bought a second torch and waited for the perfect day. Today(Saturday) was that perfect day! We started at about 5:30 pm. It was going wonderful until the transfer (about 10-15 minutes from completing a beautiful 30 inch piece.) @ about 8:54 pm. The transfer was made and then after the transfer and on the way to the glory hole the piece fell off and busted on the concrete. Here are some photos. Hey, it was only Micah and I and Linda came and helped us man(in her case, "woman") the other torch and the camera. We saw Lino making pieces that big and he had some of the best glass blowers in the nation helping him, sometimes 3 or 4 assistants that had been helping him 12 -15 years. So considering everything, we did pretty good and are getting better. We are going to get the 30 inch piece completed! (Just not today). That pesky "Global Warming" that happens every year about this time is coming upon us again, which will give us perfectly warm glass blowing weather again and we will get that 30" piece done. You will notice the bright sunshine when we started and the darkness when we finished. That's the longest a piece has ever taken us! With all the multiple pick-ups and reheats it just takes us awhile. To give you an idea of the scale of the piece, the tool bench part of my glass blowing bench is 28' long, by the time we would have transfered it and stretched the neck out like we usually do, we could have easily gotten another 6' out of it! The last picture kinda says it all.(ha ha!) - I'm laughing to keep from crying.
Nothing extraordinary happening. We have been extremely busy at the restaurant and blowing chandelier parts for a commissioned chandelier. Busy, Busy, Busy.
We are in platter mode for a few sessions again. We have sold so many platters (rondels) that the walls are looking empty. I haven't been taking pictures of the platters since I had previously taken so many and we had moved on to try the mastery of other things, but these three came out so vivid and wonderful I wanted to photograph them for posterity.
Here is a new cane vase with a window. It is about 16" tall by about 6" wide at the widest part. Thanks to Andy and Roy for the help with the Sandblasting!!
Heres the white cane lace vase that was pictured earlier with the pink (which is really stiff white with Amethyst Blue overlay on the stiff white) and made to cane. 
Here's a new vase sculpture and a twisted black/white cane platter that Micah did. He's ahead of me when I was only blowing as long as he has been.
Here we are doing our 2nd cane lace vase. This time we cased the white with amethyst blue. Once it cools you can see the amethyst blue better. A photo of the completed vase will come in a day or two. This time when making the cane, we did not gather clear over the spiraled color. Hence not clear gaps between the canes in the vase. I think I like the clear gaps better.
Micah and I have been experimenting with cane a little bit. As a matter of fact, we have decided to really spend some time focusing on cane in our glass blowing. It really helped us a lot to see Dante Marioni and Janusz Pozniak and the team @ Tacoma Museum of Glass in our recent trip. Some of the things we observed have already helped us quite a bit and will continue to help us. We have many more things we are gonna get into.
We made this vase based also on a technique that I saw Lino Tagliapietra and crew do earlier this year. It was our very first attempt and we made it look pretty easy. Not as easy as Lino, Dante, or Janusz, but for us, a huge big deal!!!! It couldn't have turned out much better. It's about 12-1/2" tall x 9" wide.
We are really excited about the cane. Stay tuned as we progress. We have several commission pieces to blow, so we will ease into it as we can get to it.
Micah and I snuck out of town and got to spend 5 solid days watching Dante Marioni, Janusz Pozniak, Paul Cunningham, and the great gaffers at Tacoma Museum of Glass blow extremely good glass! Without exception, Micah and I were the first two spectators in the hot shop every day of those five days and with one exception we were the last ones to leave. We learned alot of stuff. We met "Gabe", "Ben" and "Alex" (all very talented and competent). Heather and Jeannie were great announcers! We even got a tour behind the scenes and got to see the "cold shop" at the Tacoma Museum of Glass. Many thanks to Ken for some great shots!
I've got over 300+ photos. I'll post a few.
Also, here's a couple of pieces Dr. Kelley and Nan commissioned that we just got done after we got back.
Heather Warlick with the "Oklahoman" came out and did a great interview and even shot a few minutes of video. The lead photograph for the story they did on us made the front page next to Sam Bradford's picture. (WOW!) Then the story was in full color on the front page of the "Life" section of the newspaper. It took up almost all the front page and then ran over to another page!!! Again, thanks to Heather and her photographer for such a great story. Click on this link for the story and in the body of the story you will see the video for you push the "play" button.
As many of you know we were recently featured on OETA's "Gallery" program. Randy and Susan came out to the restaurant and the studio and shot some video over a few days and I also went into their studio for a sit-down interview. Again, thanks to them for such a nice piece! We still get folks come into the restaurant and say they saw us on OETA. Someone told me this week that they had the video up on their website. I was going to put the link here, but could not find it. If someone out there finds it let me know please and I will post the link.
Hello everyone! Sorry it's been so long since a post. We have been incredibly busy. First thanks to Elaine and Greg Dean and the crew at Dean-Lively Gallery in Edmond. Our show there was a success! We had a great turnout and want to thank everyone for coming out and taking a look and buying. Here's the new 75 piece chandelier at the Dean-Lively Gallery in Edmond. Come by there and see it in person.
Micah and I have been busy on a number of commission pieces and didn't even get pictures of several of them.
We are falling in love with some new shapes and our work is evolving a little bit. We will still do what we have been doing but we are entering into another dimension and are excited about it. Our skill level is increasing and so it the size of our work. Our tallest to date is a little over 27".
Some pictures of a new style for us are posted here today. Right now we are calling this style, "Raffinato". It's Italian for "Elegant".
The "Raffinato" right now has at least two versions. The first is the "Redento Raffinato" and we don't have a name for the 2nd one yet. We have yet to make a third version, but we know what it will look like and it is coming. The "Redento" is Italian for "redeemed". We have taken trimmings and scraps from other things from off the floor and out of the trash and "redeemed" them and made something beautiful out of them. Kind of like God does with people. He picks up people off of the scrap heap of life and makes something beautiful out of them if they will let him. Whoa! weren't expecting that were you?
Anyway here's some stuff we have been doing. The guilded olive green raffinato is 20" tall. Most of the others are taller, up to 27".
I''m posting a couple of pictures of some things Micah did by his self. The grayish granite looking one is about 15" tall and the blue/sandy beach one is over 20" inches tall, maybe 22". We don't know for sure, it sold before we measured it. Micah is really doing great. Together we are blowing the best glass we've ever blown. We are fixing to get started on Aaron's chandelier in January. He ordered one that has lots of warm transparent colors in it. Oranges, ambers, reds, gold browns, etc... We are really excited!
Micah and I fused pieces together and rolled them off the pastorelli and blew it out. We were very pleased with the way it turned out. It stands slightly over 17 inches tall and about 5 1/2 inches wide.
We also have another Indian Basket set in olive green with formal black accents. It's about 11 inches wide.
We are busy making Christmas orders and replenishing our blown glass on hand. Here's a couple of things we did yesterday. Also we are posting another photo of our new red Chandelier.
Congratulations and thanks to Mr. & Mrs. Lance Haggard and Lori Dobbins, the proud owners of a new Bella Forte Glass chandelier. In case you can't tell by the photograph, it qualifies as red. It's beautiful! It has 51 blown glass pieces in it! It is about 30 inches tall by 30 inches wide.
