Glass Blowing
Creative design and manufacturing of all kinds have always been of interest to me. This is what lead me to spend a lot of time during my academic career in some of the more artistic and creative spaces around whatever campus I was on at any given time. This love of creative design is what lead me to take a glass blowing class during my senior year at Tulane University. I immediately found that I thoroughly enjoyed glass blowing and was excited to combine glass blowing with my other design knowledge to create interesting art.
The Final Project: NOLA Spinner
The city of New Orleans and my passion for building were the inspiration for this piece. I used a carving machine called Carvey in the Tulane Makerspace to make wooden molds that I used to form glass into specific shapes. I also used this mold and melted 3D printing material in it to make the same design with a different material. I also 3D printed a few of the objects themselves. All of the pieces on the spinner are New Orleans themed being crescents, fleur de lis, and the letters to spell “NOLA”.
Fleur De Lis Cup
This cup went along with my New Orleans-themed final project. The fleur de lis is a major symbol of New Orleans I incorporated multiple times in this project. On this cup, I sandblasted the fleur de lis on one side of the cup then sandblasted the outline of a fleur de lis on the other. I really liked the contrast of an image and its “negative” or “inverse” being on opposite sides of the cup. I laser cut tape in the shape of the fleur de lis and then put the tape on the glass before sandblasting which is how I was able to make the two sides have such clean lines.
Below you will see the rest of my glass-blown objects. They range from abstract designs to functional flower vases and cups. On a few of the pieces, I even played around with incorporating different colors of glass into one piece.
