Southern-Flames

The Larry Scott class offered through South­ern Flames last week­end was, to me, many things:

• A huge edu­ca­tion. Larry demon­strated many tricks and tech­niques that I had never before seen, and explained some things I had seen before in a new way so that I finally “got it.” I sort of under­stood the idea behind lin­ear encas­ing already, but was miss­ing one lit­tle aspect — the very acute angle of the cas­ing rod rel­a­tive to the bead. Now I can do it (though I still need prac­tice, duh). I’m also totally sold now on using boro pun­ties for mak­ing cane and lat­tic­cino, because my hands can twist the pun­ties much eas­ier than mandrels.
• An impressively-run work­shop. South­ern Flames knows how to do things right! The orga­ni­za­tion pro­vides bagels & cream cheese if you don’t have time for break­fast; the class TA takes lunch orders and brings your lunch back so you don’t lose so much time going out to get it; var­i­ous lit­tle things like man­drel hold­ers, stick­ers to put on your man­drels, water cups, and so on are already set up. Oh, and Carl was a most excel­lent TA.
• A really, really frus­trat­ing expe­ri­ence. Okay, so I was the least-experienced glass per­son in the class, and it did show at times. I was work­ing on a Minor burner, when I run a Beth­le­hem Piranha at home, so my torch wasn’t always doing what I expected. I didn’t have quite enough elbow room so had to be care­ful of the space around me. Pos­si­bly the worst thing, though, was the floor right behind my chair — every time some­one walked on it, it jig­gled, jig­gling me, usu­ally right when I was try­ing to pre­cisely place a dot on my bead. I’m dot-challenged enough any­way, so I don’t need any fur­ther hin­drance. In the end, of the six beads I attempted, only one came out fairly decent. Four oth­ers were more or less show­ing the tech­nique but far from accept­able, and the last one…well, the Night Sky bead went into the water cup after first the bead release broke and then the bead itself broke.Some things are just bet­ter attempted at home on famil­iar ground!
• A ver­i­ta­ble feast of eye candy. Larry’s beads are to die for. I wish I could have afforded to buy more than one. I’ll just have to prac­tice mak­ing my own variations.

I did indeed get my money’s and time’s worth out of the week­end, and I would highly rec­om­mend Larry’s classes to any lam­p­worker. Any prob­lems with the class were strictly due to the stu­dent, not the teacher, LOL.