Dante Marioni and Benjamin Moore Masterclass

Dante and Ben's class is primarily demonstrations and lectures on the venetian techniques of glass blowing. Dante demonstrates for the first 2 hours of the class, then Ben gives a 2 hour slide presentation each day. The afternoon and evening is split between the students each of us getting 1 and half hours of glass blowing time per day.

Dante demos a smaller version of a jug that he makes traditionally in opaque colours and this jug is normally displayed with 2 other vessels.

The finished jug

Dante makes it look easy to make these very elegant goblets.

The end of Anna Matouskova's class

The last day of class we had a small exhibition of our work. This is Anna Matouskova giving a speech. 

Anna and Angela both made pieces along with the class. This is one of Anna's pieces.

For our exhibition everybody in the class set out their work on tables and we also hung up paintings we had done throughout the class.

This is some of the work on my table. The closest piece in this photo is my very first attempt at a pate de verre. This piece is very thin and fragile. As I divested it from the mold pieces were breaking off it. The following three images are all close ups of my other pieces I made throughout the class. I still have cold working on these pieces to complete as we didn't have any time to do this during the class.

Today we went on field trip to Achavanich Standing Stones. There is about 30 of these stones arranged in a horseshoe shape. The tallest stone is  around 2 metres.

The next stop along the way was the Camster Cairns. These stone buildings are were built around 3500BC and were thought to have been used as burial chambers and as ritual sites.

Angela Thwaites the TA for the class was the bravest and went inside first.

Angela, Karin, Julie and I inside the Cairn. It's was surprisingly quite roomy in there considering we had to crawl through the door and down a tunnel to get to the middle room.

Last stop on our little outing was Latheronwheel Harbour. 

The Kiln is packed full of molds ready to be fired. Everyone has been working very hard and we've had many late nights in the studio finishing our molds.

This is my first mold out of the kiln. 

My first piece of cast glass at North Lands came out looking pretty good after some cold working and  good clean up. I used a grey colour for this piece although in this image it looks quite green.