If you’re wearing jewelry, look closely, it may have glass beads on it. Some may be smooth, others with grooves. Glass beads can have one color, others multicolored. But have you ever stopped and wondered how they were actually made?
Jodi Peterson is a glass artist in Moorhead and, she creates her art under the name Wolf Nest Glass Studios. She is making a glass bead, like the ones on jewelry, and it’s being made from the searing hot flames of mapp gas.
“The glass rod you hold at an angle, like you’re writing at the tip of the flame,” Peterson says, as she is torching glass to shape it. “I want to get that red hot and glowing, and now I’ve got the glass hot.”
Peterson has to wear sunglasses to protect her eyes from the flames UV rays. In one hand she holds a steel rod called a mandrel and in the other is a blue glass rod, basically a long thin glass stick. She holds the tips of both over the flame similarly to how someone would hold a pen.
“You wanna keep both of them moving. Once it’s gotten flopsy, I always keep the glass rod In front of the mandrel.”
Flopsy glass. It has a bright orange color with a caramel consistency. Peterson carefully wraps hot, gooey, caramel looking glass around the steel rod. She constantly adjusts how far away the glass is from the flame tip. Peterson says the reason for this is that “I don’t want liquid glass on liquid glass on the mandrel. Because when I’m trying to add liquid glass to liquid glass it’s not going to work very well.”
After the glass rod is halfway melted onto the steel rod, Peterson removes it from the heat to cool it down.
Peterson says that making glass beads will be a part of what studio crawlers get to do here. “What I’m anticipating is doing flame work, bead work. So people coming can make their beads and see how easy it is and kind of enjoy a little bit about glass.”
Peterson has been creating glass pieces since she was in college.
“Before then I was a painter, a weaver, and a sculptor,” she says. “And then when I did my Masters in painting I started doing the glass blowing and I was like no, that’s just what I wanna do now ‘cause it’s amazing with hot glass.”
While no doubt people will marvel at her glass blowing talent, the real star of the show is the flames. Even kids can create their own beads with the flames.
“I find fascinating to have 8 year olds working with torches and they haven’t burned themselves yet so I think that’s cool.”
Peterson is an artist who is passionate about what she does. It’s reflected in her work and desire to teach people to create art out of glass.
This story has been part of a preview for the 2016 Studio Crawl put on by the Fargo-Moorhead Visual Artists. Jodi Peterson and other artists will open their studios to the public on October 1st and 2nd to showcase their art and how they create it.