Unconventional pumpkins raise funds for Bloomington Glass Guild

Glass blowing requires a not-so-steady hand and lots of finesse.

At least that’s what Abby Gitlitz, Bloomington Glass Guild member and coordinator of the first-ever Great Glass Pumpkin Patch, said.

The Great Glass Pumpkin Patch took place on the southwest lawn of the Monroe County Courthouse on Saturday. The event featured multicolored, whimsical pumpkins handmade by eight local glass artists and 20 novice participants of the Bloomington Glass Guild.

Gitlitz has been working with glass since she was a student at MIT in Massachusetts 14 years ago. Her love of glass art resulted in her recent completion of a Master of Fine Arts program at Southern Illinois University.

“It’s hard, it continues to challenge me,” she said. “It’s exciting because it’s challenging.”

Gitlitz said the goal of the Glass Pumpkin Patch was to raise money for an open-access glass studio, which would provide residents with a venue for learning glass art techniques. 

This open-access studio would eventually benefit IU, she said, providing the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts with a place to teach glass classes that it doesn’t currently have.

“It’s expensive to build a glass shop,” Gitlitz said. “We can provide classes through the Glass Guild using its facility and resources.”

The guild was able to provide 206 glass pumpkins for the event this year, and after four hours, the pumpkin count was down to a mere 40.

Pumpkin prices ranged from $25 to $200 depending on the amount of skill required to make the art, the different colors used and the size of the piece.

Gitlitz described glass blowing as a methodical procedure where an artist must continuously reheat and mold their creation.

“There’s this constant play back and forth,” Gitlitz said.

To form a blown glass piece, a blob of molten glass of about 2100 degrees Fahrenheit must first be plucked from within a furnace with a hollow, four-foot pipe.

Molten glass has a consistency similar to that of honey, Gitlitz said, so the hollow pipe must constantly be rotated to maintain an even shape. Then, the artist must blow on the cool end of the pipe to inflate the glass at the other end.

The working temperature range for a piece of glass is 1300 to 1900 degrees Fahrenheit.  

To maintain this temperature and get the desired circular shape of a pumpkin, the process of heating, rotation and gentle air flow must be repeated several times.

“It takes at least two people to make a pumpkin,” Gitlitz said. “Glass blowing is a very social event.”

Once the round pumpkin shape is formed, it is then rolled in colored, crushed glass and reheated to create a vivid, continuous pattern of color around the pumpkin.

“For me, it’s about the colors — these vibrant, luscious colors,” Gitlitz said.

Meanwhile, the second person helping to create the pumpkin dips into the furnace for a smaller globule of melted glass. This small amount of glass becomes the stem of the pumpkin, Gitlitz said.

The handler of the pumpkin stem shapes the molten glass into a ridged cone shape, using a specific mold.

Gitlitz described this process as the formation of a long, tubular cupcake wrapper.
Using a busy hand to keep the liquid glass from dripping and losing its shape, the stem artist then sticks the stem to the top of the pumpkin body.

“It’s like trying to catch a fish. You are constantly moving and trying to swirl this piece of glass,” Gitlitz said.

After positioning the stem, the tubular piece is cut and wrapped around a copper pipe to form the loops of a pumpkin vine.

“This gives our stem character,” Gitlitz said.

With a personal belief that anyone can make glass art, Gitlitz hopes that anyone interested in glass comes to the guild to learn the basics of glass blowing.

“When the guild first started, one out of eight of us knew how to blow glass,” she said. “Everyone else just learned as they went along.”