[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

The Bowl

I chose my glass carefully, taking sheets of coloured, transparent 
fusible glass and layering one on top of another until I got the 
colour I wanted for this piece, which was to be a birthday present to 
my daughter-in-love. I wanted a rich deep crimson and found glass 
that would give me that. I made a pattern from a sheet of paper, 
first cutting it square and then rounding off the corners; we 
measured the pattern and Linda, the store owner, cut off the right 
amount for my project, two 8-inch squares.

I'm not very good a cutting glass yet, but this was simple enough; it 
was a good chance for me to practice, anyway. It's mostly a matter of 
confidence. Glass is such *hard* stuff. You cut it by scoring the 
surface with a carbide roller and then snapping off the scored part 
with pliers. I rounded off the corners of both pieces of red glass, 
getting a little better and a little more confident with each cut, 
and then I ground the pieces down until they conformed with each 
other and with the pattern. There.

Next: cutting up the dichroic glass. This is wondrous (and extremely 
expensive) stuff: glass reflecting two different colours. I had clear 
dichroic to play with, and the colours it would reflect would depend 
on the coloured glass it sat on -- but these colours would be 
completely unpredictable. That's part of the fun. Getting more and 
more confident with the cutter, I scored and broke my dichroic into 
19 squarish bits and made a design: four bits in each rounded-off 
corner and five in the centre. I glued everything together, thinking 
loving thoughts about this bowl's recipient.

And then went on to make two other fused/dichroic dishes using the 
same rounded-square pattern, one in a gentle mauve and one in soft 
green, and then a clear plate (no dichroic) edged with the red and 
mauve trimmings from the first two. And then it was time to stop. But 
my cutting had improved immeasurably.

Later, Linda fired my projects in the shop kiln until the stacked 
glasses fused, and then she put the fused flat plates over moulds and 
fired them again until the glass softened and slumped into or around 
the molds, and then we were done. One crimson flanged bowl, two 
shallow plates (mauve, green), and one candleholder (clear with red 
and mauve tips). It wasn't until I picked the projects up that I knew 
what they would look like, other than very generally. Fused glass is 
like that; there's a certain uncertainty about it. That's one of the 
things I like.

I'm learning about glass, mostly about respecting its character. 
There are things you can't ask of it, because it just won't do them. 
You cannot, for example, cut a circle out of glass and pop it out, 
regardless of what happens in the movies. You cannot ask it to give 
you an interior right angle -- that's not going to happen. You have 
to work with its properties, respecting its nature. At best, you can 
coax it into fairly gentle curves, but it really wants to snap along 
a straight line.

You cannot ask glass to stick to solder; it won't. You have to stick 
something to the glass for the solder to adhere to -- copper foil 
with an adhesive backing -- and solder, in turn, has its own 
properties. You have to respect the ways in which glass expands and 
contracts in firing or your piece may shatter. You have to take care 
in the rate of heating and cooling.

You may be the creator, but glass is your co-creator. You may develop 
tremendous skill, but the glass still demands your understanding and 
wisdom, simply because it is glass.

I had great spiritual fun with this; it made me understand a little 
better how God, in dealing with us, is tremendously skillful and 
creative, but is still working with us as we are, where we are, 
because we are God's co-creators. We can choose to co-create in 
lovely or hideous ways. We have that freedom, which is in our nature, 
as the tendency to break in straight lines is in glass's nature, as a 
drop of melted solder wants to form a sphere. The chances are 
excellent that however we turn out, we're going to be imperfect and 
unpredictable, and that's quite all right, because imperfection and 
unpredictability can be extraordinarily beautiful.

But unlike glass, we get a say in the matter. We can choose painful 
self-insight or willful self-ignorance. We can choose to be loving or 
insensitive in our dealings with others. We can choose power and 
control or humility and poverty of spirit. We can choose to accept 
grace or refuse it. And God respects our choices.

After I picked up my projects (which turned out beautifully), I 
stopped in at the local glassblowers' gallery; I really am finding 
this glass-stuff fascinating. I watched a young man skillfully heat 
and shape and play with glowing blobs of molten glass, adroitly 
cupping and turning and rolling and nipping them, working quickly and 
gracefully, clearly knowing exactly what he was doing. The shop was 
full of magnificent pieces, sculptures in glass; I thought they must 
have been molded, but no, every piece was hand-blown. Stunning stuff. 
Any creation of beauty must, I think, make God smile -- if nothing 
else, with fellow feeling.

I thought: God gives us choices. God lets us pick what matters to us, 
instead of insisting on giving us what God had planned. So instead of 
wrapping the crimson bowl up as a gift, I offered all four pieces to 
my daughter-in-love and let her pick the one she liked best.

She chose the mauve.

(For Linda, Jill, Meghan, and Yolanda; and for Georgiana, with love)



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A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in 
no other way. -- Mark Twain