Notes, resources, and tools at the intersection of glassblowing and everything else.
I've been blowing glass for years: one or two nights a week, usually at Public Glass in San Francisco's Bayview neighborhood, where I also served as Board President.
Glass is not a hobby I picked up to relax.
It is the thing that taught me how to work with heat, timing, and irreversibility in ways that no amount of program management ever quite did.
You get one gather. The physics are not negotiable. There are no rollbacks.
This repo is where I collect things that live at the edge of that practice: resources for other artists, notes on technique, tools I've built, and the occasional project that started in the studio and ended up somewhere more public.
My finished work is at artglasssf.com. This repo is the shop table.
Useful things, half-burned notes, tools that work, tools that need another pass, and the occasional reminder that just because you can put glass in a kiln does not mean you should put that glass in that kiln.
Glassblowing is a team sport that looks like a solo act.
The gaffer at the pipe is visible. The assistant gathering the next color, managing the heat, handing off the tools at exactly the right moment: less so.
I've been both. The collaboration is most of it.
The disciplines I work in:
- Hot glass / glassblowing - Furnace work. Gathering, shaping, inflating, finishing. Vases, bowls, paperweights, cocktail glass. The version most people picture when they hear the word.
- Flameworking - Torch work, also called lampworking or torchworking. Solid rods or hollow tubes heated in a stationary flame, then shaped, sculpted, or blown with tools, gravity, and breath. Borosilicate lives here, but so does soft glass, bead work, marbles, pendants, small sculpture, and tiny hollow forms.
- Cold work - Cutting, grinding, polishing. What you do after the heat is done and the piece is out of the kiln, when the piece stops glowing and starts telling you what you actually made.
The studio is Public Glass, 1750 Armstrong Avenue, San Francisco.
Nonprofit, open access, Bayview/Hunters Point. If you're in the Bay Area and want to try glassblowing, it is the right place to start.
Files: Business_Of_Being_An_Artist_Presentation.html, index.html
A full slide presentation built for the Glass Art Society 2026 conference.
The subject is the one most glass artists avoid until it becomes a crisis: pricing, income, and the business of sustaining a practice.
The presentation covers:
- Why many glass artists are working for too little per hour, and why that is a math problem before it is an art problem
- How to reverse-engineer a real revenue goal from actual living costs
- The gallery consignment calculation most artists should run before signing anything
- Why underpricing is almost never just about numbers
- One platform done well versus five done badly
- Having a day job as a strategy, not a failure
- Multiple income streams as a resilient practice, not a patchwork compromise
- The business basics that can wait, and the ones that cannot
The deck was built to be used live, with presenter notes throughout and a companion worksheet handed out early enough to matter.
File: Artist_Budget_Pricing_Tool.xlsx
The companion spreadsheet to the GAS presentation.
Fill in the yellow cells. Everything else calculates automatically.
Six sections:
| Section | What It Does |
|---|---|
| Budget & Survival Costs | Your share of monthly living costs: housing, food, health, transportation, all of it. Shared-household aware. |
| Other Income Offsets | Partner income, pensions, part-time work, or other income that reduces what your art actually needs to earn. |
| Annual Living Cost | Strips out other income so you can see the real gap your practice needs to close. |
| Annual Business Costs | Studio access, materials, marketing, shows, shipping, equipment, and the full cost of running a glass practice. |
| Taxes & Savings | The one nobody warns you about. Self-employment tax and income tax are not optional. |
| Revenue Goal | The number. Not what you would like to make. What you need to make to be okay. |
A second sheet, Pricing Calculator, walks through:
- Required hourly rate, reverse-engineered from your revenue goal
- Skilled trade rate benchmarks
- Gallery consignment math with your effective hourly rate after the split
- Cost-plus pricing for a single piece, floor price first
- A blended income model so you can see which streams close the gap
A Quick Reference sheet has formulas, real-talk answers to common questions, and the notes artists tend to need right when the spreadsheet starts feeling personal.
The old "What Is Coming" list is not a list anymore. It is a docs/ folder, because at some point "coming soon" starts to sound like a kiln that has been beeping for forty minutes while everyone pretends not to hear it.
| File | What It Is |
|---|---|
docs/README.md |
Start here for the studio notes. |
docs/beginner-resource-guide.md |
For people who just took their first class and do not know what comes next. Short version: take another class, learn to assist, do not buy a torch because you had one good afternoon. |
docs/color-compatibility-notes.md |
Hot glass color notes, compatibility reminders, COE caveats, scrap-bucket warnings, and the basic rule that labels are cheaper than failure. |
docs/kiln-schedule-reference.md |
A schedule and log template. Not a magic internet recipe. The kiln does not care where the PDF came from. |
docs/flamework-to-hot-glass-transition.md |
Notes for torch workers moving into furnace work. Related skills, different body, different heat, different timing. |
docs/public-glass-community-programs.md |
A structure for documenting community programs, demos, outreach, team events, and the invisible work that makes the visible magic happen. |
These are the outside reference points for this repo:
- ArtGlass SF - finished work, artist information, and the public-facing glass practice
- ArtGlass SF glassblowing info - class links, suppliers, books, groups, and glassblowing resources collected over time
- Public Glass - San Francisco's public-access glass studio and school, and the place where much of this practice grew up
- Public Glass classes - beginner classes, glassblowing, flameworking, fusing, coldworking, private lessons, youth classes, master classes, and team events
- Public Glass rentals - kiln shop, hot shop, cold shop, and flame shop rental information
Technical references used in the notes:
GlassART/
|-- Artist_Budget_Pricing_Tool.xlsx
|-- Business_Of_Being_An_Artist_Presentation.html
|-- index.html
|-- README.md
`-- docs/
|-- README.md
|-- beginner-resource-guide.md
|-- color-compatibility-notes.md
|-- flamework-to-hot-glass-transition.md
|-- kiln-schedule-reference.md
`-- public-glass-community-programs.md
- Photos or diagrams from ArtGlass SF work that make the process notes less abstract
- A printable beginner handout for first-time Public Glass students
- A compatibility test log that can be used at the bench or kiln shelf without opening a laptop
- Public Glass community-program case studies, once there is enough documentation to make them useful and not just sentimental
Glass is one thread in a wider practice. The other repos in this account cover:
- food-wine-farms - AI-assisted regional food and wine guides, including Sonoma Chef and the Food Wine Farms apps
- tpm-templates - program lifecycle templates from the professional side
- learning-notes - technical concepts and course notes across security, systems design, and program craft
- teaching-notes - teaching materials, demos, explanations, and workshops built to make technical ideas easier to understand
GlassART because that is what it is: glass as art, not as product, not as craft in the diminutive sense.
The people I've worked alongside at Public Glass are serious artists. The work deserves the word.
Eric White
Glass artist, past Board President at Public Glass
artglasssf.com | publicglass.org | San Francisco, CA