Our Glassblowing Experience

This weekend I surprised Mark with a fun day. Kaylie spent Saturday night with Jessica and Jeff (THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!) and Mark and I got to go play. We started out with a long walk along the Ruston Way waterfront - good people watching (several mohawks, a few unfortunate tube tops, tons of families, a crazy roller skater, etc.). Then a trip to the Museum of Glass where we looked at the exhibits & watched them blow glass in the "hot shop". Once Mark was appropriately intrigued and dying to try it himself, I told him that our next stop was our own glassblowing class at the Tacoma Glass Studio. We had a great time, saw some absolutely amazing talent and art and even made our own halfway decent pieces!

This is Mark's work. Well, it's actually a display from the Museum of Glass, but I'm sure he could have done this.

Outside the Museum

Mark's turn in class. Here he is heating his glass in the "glory hole" (I know, it sounds awful, doesn't it?) to over 1,200 degrees.


Mark and our instructor, Patrick, laying the color on the glass

Cooling the rod in water so that he could lay more glass on the end.


Mark's bowl in progress

My turn!

After our glass blowing, we went to the Tides Tavern in Gig Harbor for a great dinner, went on a long walk on the Gig Harbor waterfront, then home for a nice quiet evening at home where we got really wild & crazy and caught up on the latest Lost and Grey's Anatomy.

Sunday morning: We slept in until 7:45!!! Then made a big breakfast of blueberry muffins, quiche, sausage, fruit & lots of coffee, then headed out in the kayak. We should have gone out before breakfast when the water was perfectly smooth because it got very windy and choppy while we were out. We put the spray skirt on the kayak, but still headed back in after about a 1/2 hour. The water was splashing over the front of the kayak and into my face... it would be very fair to say that I prefer warm weather kayaking. Kaylie got home around 1:00 (we were sooo happy to see our girl! We missed her terribly!) and we headed back to Tacoma to pick up our glass, a quick stop at Trader Joe's and home for a BBQ. A perfect weekend!