Last week at our Small Craft Advisory craft show in Stanwoodopolis, I met the Director emeritus of the world famous Pilchuck Glass School who was instrumental in bringing Dale Chihuly\u2019s vision of promoting all things glass.\u00a0 Pilchuck Glass School sits in the foothills just above town and started back in 1971 with a couple of instructors and 18 students who lived in tents and makeshift huts overlooking the Skagit delta and Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains.\u00a0 If you\u2019re ever wondering why the area has a glass blower behind every fir tree, the folks who studied at the school fell in love with the place and stuck around the Pacific Northwest.<\/p>\n
When the school was small, we locals were invited up once a year for a free tour of the facilities.\u00a0 Bring a picnic lunch, bottle of wine, watch the glass blowing, wander the grounds.\u00a0 They were a welcoming bunch back then.\u00a0 Course, like most successful enterprises, they changed, started charging $25 for a visit, copped an attitude of artistic superiority and pretty much ruined the sweet ambiance of the earlier years.\u00a0 Fame will do that in case you\u2019ve lived on the South End too long.<\/p>\n
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I was up there with Smoker Bill, one of my cronies, in the early \u201890\u2019s to visit his friend who was in charge of maintenance.\u00a0 Bill was probably the best and most creative woodworker I\u2019d ever met.\u00a0 Might still be.\u00a0 He could do things with wood most folks couldn\u2019t begin to imagine.\u00a0 His buddy Richard the maintenance man was no slouch either.\u00a0 We drove through all the signs prohibiting entrance to unauthorized personnel and met up with Richard who gave us a tour of the new and old facilities, then we found seats in the open air glass blowing arena to watch two women work the furnace in a choreographed dance of glass gathers on the end of a pipe back into the furnace, blow a bubble of molten silica, another pass in the blast furnace, add an outer layer of glass, etc., etc.\u00a0 These women were known for their giant fruits.\u00a0 Apples, pears, big lemons.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Gotta say, not my idea of great art.\u00a0 Not even good art.\u00a0 Big ass fruits, c\u2019mon\u2026.\u00a0 But part way through an apple the size of a small poodle, one of the artists spoke to an assistant, pointed in our direction and next thing you know we were unceremoniously being escorted out of the premises.\u00a0\u00a0 Richard apologized but we said it was okay, rules are rules.\u00a0 Although, to be honest, when I hear someone say how bohemian the lifestyle is at the School, how free and untethered, just let their imaginations soar without earthbound restrictions, I mostly think of a long row of mutant apples and pears lined up, price tags affixed, ready for shipping to adoring buyers across the nation.\u00a0 \u00a0So it really doesn\u2019t bother me \u2026 and actually makes me say with some unwarranted pride , as I did with the former Director, yeah, I was kicked out of Pilchuck Glass School.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week at our Small Craft Advisory craft show in Stanwoodopolis, I met the Director emeritus of the world famous Pilchuck Glass School who was instrumental in bringing Dale Chihuly\u2019s vision of promoting all things glass.\u00a0 Pilchuck Glass School sits in the foothills just above town and started back in 1971 with a couple of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[5045,5044],"class_list":["post-15960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-glass-pariah","tag-pilchuck-school-dropout"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15960"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15961,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15960\/revisions\/15961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}