(soft-tempo music) - Here at the Glass Center, we do everything pretty much that you can imagine being done in glass.

We have our artist residencies, we have exhibitions and around the holidays we do things called hot jams and you can come in, you can watch people making ornaments, you can try making an ornament yourself.

You can walk in here and know nothing about glass, you've never tried it and you can do one of these ornament workshops.

(gentle music) - So today I'm gonna be making a flamesicle.

We're gonna be using flat pieces of borosilicate glass and melding and manipulating it in the torch flame.

We're gonna be adding jade white and a ruby red to add little embellishments to it.

(gentle guitar music) So ruby and garnet turns transparent when you heat it but once it starts to cool, it'll be back to its nice color.

Add some ruby dots.

Now to heat the base, I can twist off the bottom, taper it to a point.

And you have a finished flamesicle.

- [Jason] I chose to work in the hot shop because it's very immediate.

You pull the glass out of the furnace at over 2,000 degrees.

At this temperature the glass is kinda like honey on the end of there.

So I'm gonna add a little bit of color.

When we're doing demonstrations, we get asked is all of the glass orange?

It's not orange it just glows orange when it's hot.

(slow-tempo music) So I'm gonna hook up my glow tube, so that's gonna allow me to put the air pressure into this.

(slow-tempo music) Now I have to grab a little bit of clear glass to make our hook.

That's ready to go into the kiln.

The main thing I love about working at the Pittsburgh Glass Center is the community of artists that we have here.

- There are very few facilities like this in the country.

We were known on the national and international glass scene better than we were known here in Pittsburgh.

People were coming from outside of the region to come take classes with master artists that we were bringing in, but Pittsburghers were still calling us and asking if we could repair their windshield.

(quirky music) - [Rebecca] In the kilnforming studio, we actually start where I've precut shapes so they can use a variety of these materials.

We've got chunks of glass called frit.

We've got strands of glass that are called stringers.

From there, it's really open to the participants' creativity.

Everything that we make in our Christmas Make-It-Now, we're gonna carefully carry into a kiln and all the glass is gonna fuse together.

Here we have this piece, which is gonna be a (speaks foreign language).

- We use the (speaks foreign language) or Hanukkah.

The one single candle will be here and the rest of them will be up here.

It's going to be a wave.

- [Woman] Pretty cool that somebody who's a total beginner could be working side by side with someone who's a master artist.

- You could come with no experience and then if you're intrigued, which I'm pretty sure you will be then you could come back.

- [Woman] We're gonna make sure that you're safe, that you have a great time and that you make a really cool object.

- We do warn students that it's addictive.

(laughing) (soft-tempo music)