(soft piano music)
- My name is Gail Allard.
I am the owner of Salado
Glassworks here in Salado, Texas,
and I have been blowing glass since 2002.
I found myself in a glass
studio in Temple, Texas,
and I just fell in love with the craft.
From the moment that I saw
the movement of the glass,
the fire, the heat, the smell,
everything, I fell in love with it.
The glass is 2000 degrees.
You can't actually touch it,
but you have to use all these tools
to make it do what you want it to do.
You're constantly working against time
and you have a very small window
of being able to create
what you wanna create
and make it happen.
You have to use the gravity,
you have to use the temperature.
You only have to have a vision
of what you're trying to make
before you even get started.
And once you get started,
there's no turning back.
You know, you've gotta
go from start to finish.
You can't stop, you can't set it down.
When you look at the work that I make,
there is a lot of color that
is being thrown together.
I'd like to twist and pull and blend,
where there's balance,
maybe create a little bit of imbalance.
And I like a little bit of chaos, too
in the patterns and
things that I work with.
I think my most favorite
part about glassblowing
is that initial gather of glass.
Through a series of blowings and shapings,
we start to build the form of the vessel,
or, you know, the sculpture
piece that we're working on.
And we use a lot of
gravity, a lot of heat.
From that point, we're
stretching, we're pulling,
we're blowing, we're
letting gravity take over
and kind of really helping us create
whatever it is that
we've designed to make.
When I'm done finishing the piece,
we're gonna break it off the punte,
and that is where it's
gonna go into the oven.
It's gonna stay overnight
and cool down very slowly.
The next day, we'll be able to take it out
and see what we've made.
Every day when I come into work,
I get to create with a medium
that allows me to do something
completely different
from one day to the next.
I'm very thankful that I
get to be a glassblower,
to share my passion and some
of the work that I create
with those that get to come
in and witness me creating
and hopefully, something
inspires them enough
that they get to take a little
piece of me home with them.
- [Announcer] Panasonic.
