Riedau,AUT

Riedau,AUT

Monday, 29. October 2012

They say ‚you should ‘stop when the going’s good‘. That’s why we left Nový Bor and Štěpánek even though we liked it a lot there. We could have stayed for ever, but instead we went to Paul Osterberger in Austria. He would be our next stop; we know him from the Glass School in Zwiesel, where he would occasionally arrive and fill up his car with the leftover glass waste. Paul had trained as a glass maker in Zwiesel, but four years before us so we only knew him from his ‘waste collecting’ visits. Following an ingenious idea, he built his own studio and everything in it, from the heating drum made with vacuum cleaner parts to the self-welded work bench and forged glass making tools. Paul makes ‘Forest-Glass’ by recycling glass waste from other studios. He sorts the shards by colour and heats them in the furnace to 500°C. He then rolls the glass on his pre-heated pipe, to immediately melt it into a smooth mass in the heat drum. Now he can begin the normal glass making processes of blowing and forming. We immediately tried it out but it was really not easy to bring the mix up to a good workable temperature. Franca soon remarked that we are now melting glass and making glass at the same time. After lunch, Louise blew a second small bowl from the shard mass. Our new small bowls look very different, with many bubbles (air pockets from the process), a variety of colours and shapes. It was just as nice to exchange old school gossip and chat about teachers, training and Zwiesel.

After a little detour to Germany, tomorrow we move on to Murano in Italy. We’ll see what staying in a convent will do for us girls! A friend gave us the tip to sleep there, which seems to be a common thing in Italy, or so we hear.