Glass artist Courtney Branam pulls murrine and makes a bottle out of it

In this video we see Courtney Branam pulling murrine, and then using that murrine to create a bottle. He began by covering a very hard opaque glass, called duro, with a layer of transparent colored glass, and then covered that with more clear glass. That mass is then stretched into a 10 meter rod which is about the width of a pencil. This is the process of pulling cane. That cane is then chopped into sections the length of a pencil and bundled together, then wrapped with some special wire.

This is where our video begins. Courtney picks up the bundle out of the garage and heats and smashes it into a square profile, then he hands me the rod and stretches it, so the square is about a centimeter across. Julian Goza grabs the new cane and places it into an oven where it can cool down slowly.

Once the square cane is cool, it gets chopped into little bits called murrine. Courtney arranges the murrine on a piece of ceramic kiln shelf for the roll up. This is the second half of the video. Courtney rolls up the murrine into a tube, I bring him some glass to plug the end, and he makes a cup. That cup then gets filled with a clear glass bubble and blown up. Nao Yamamoto assists him by turning the pipe and blowing up the bobble. The bubble is stretched long and made into a bottle. Because the inner squiggles are harder than the surrounding glass, they make the surface lumpy, which is cool.

As you can see, a lot of work goes into making a bottle this way. This is what glassblowers do for fun. Try it yourself, you may like it.

Видео Glass artist Courtney Branam pulls murrine and makes a bottle out of it канала Greg Owen