Photographs by Kevin A. Roberts
Mike Hayes is Third Degree Glass Factory’s bauble king. “Mike’s been here since day one,” says instructor and co-founder Doug Auer. “For the last five or six years, he’s made every single ornament himself.” Hayes makes them year-round, in fact, because people buy them in December and April and June and every other month. (Hayes does art glass, too—but two or three days out of each week are ornament days.)
As we stand in front of the intense heat kicked out by Third Degree’s huge furnaces, Hayes begins the process of making an ornament from an inchoate blob of molten glass. “So the first thing he does is gather that clear glass,” Auer explains, as Hayes pokes his pipe into an oven, “about 3 ounces’ worth.” He then whirls the pipe around a few times, to stretch the blob into an oblong shape. “Then, he takes it over to these scoops,” Auer says, nodding to the right side of the Hot Shop, “which are filled with colored glass—it’s called frit—and he rolls it in that, and it sticks to the clear glass.” After melting the two together, Hayes lays his pipe on a bench, slowly turning it as he blows the perfect sphere with a foot switch–operated air compressor set at 7 pounds per square inch. He cuts the bauble off of the pipe, gathers a dab of clear glass from the furnace, drops it on top, and fashions that thread into a loop for hanging. Then it’s ready to go into a cooling oven. It’ll remain there over the next several hours—if it cools too fast, it cracks. Every move in the process requires perfect fluidity, and timing is everything—pause too long, the glass cools, and everything’s ruined. “It’s really just one shot at getting that perfect sphere shape,” Auer says. “But if you’re doing it right, it really just happens naturally.”
- The melted glass hits 2,070 degrees
- 1,000 pounds of glass are melted weekly
- 82 degrees is the average temperature in the Hot Shop
- 2,143 ornaments were made in 2012
- 1,042 ornaments had been made in 2013 at press time
All ornaments are $20, available at Third Degree (5200 Delmar, 314-367-4527, thirddegreeglassfactory.com). And if you want to blow your own, classes start November 16.
