Holiday Adventure: Creating A Glass Blown Ornament

This holiday season, there's lots of options for spending time with loved ones or friends, but News 9's Robin Marsh and Lacie Lowry found a unique alternative.

For their Holiday Adventure, they made Christmas ornaments by glass blowing at Blue Sage Studios.

Blue Sage's owner Andy Boatman took them through the process. Boatman is a middle school technology teacher by day. After work, he leaves that classroom for this one and sharing a passion he learned 18 years ago from his aunt.

“She lives out in Santa Fe,” he remembers. “My brother and I went out to go skiing one winter and she invited us to come into the studio, and we just stayed there for a week and blew glass.”

Robin and Lacie began by picking two colors for their ornaments. Then, Boatman steered them through the process of first gathering glass onto the end of a blow pipe, a hollow stainless steel tube.

First, Robin and then Lacie rolled the hot glass on the table before gathering more hot glass and rolling it in the colors.

From there they went into another furnace that super heats the glass to 2,400 degrees and melts the color. Boatman then directed Robin and Lacie to blow into the pipe until the glass blew up into an ornament.

“You have to be present with the glass all the time,” Boatman said when Lacie asked him why he loves doing this so much. “You don’t really get to think about other things much.”

Boatman then sealed the top of the ornament and added a loop. The ornament then goes into an annealer that keeps the glass at 900 degrees so all the molecules align and give it strength then slowly cools to room temperature.

The next day, Robin and Lacie were able to pick up their ornaments and see the final product.

Groups or individuals can take a class at Blue Sage Studios, but classes for the holidays are filling up fast, Boatman warned.