Melody Jewitt wipes her brow. It’s only 1 C outside, but inside her Gladstone Avenue workshop, things are hot.
Jewitt, who operates Flo Glassblowing, Ottawa’s only glassblowing studio, pulls a fiery ball of liquid glass out of a furnace heated to 2000 F.
Meanwhile, Jacob Guillemette, her 13-year-old assistant on this project, is sitting patiently nearby as one of about a dozen people crowded around the workshop for Flo’s fourth-anniversary open house, held April 5.
On Jewitt’s go, Guillemette blows into the hollow rod holding the red-hot liquid blob. The ball grows and grows. Soon, after a delicate process of shaping, re-heating, and shaping again, they’ve turned what used to be a wonky orange globe into a plate.
“That was amazing,” said Isabel Sebastiao, a visitor who said she had never seen glassblowing before. “There’s a whole art to it. It was amazing to see how it transforms.”
Flo offers glassblowing and flamework classes for people who want to try their hand at working with glass.
Since the studio opened in 2011, Jewitt said she has seen everything from seniors’ groups to bachelor parties walk through its front doors.
“We brought it here with the main intent to offer it as a teaching facility,” said Jewitt, one of three teachers at the workshop. “In the last four years we’ve essentially established a community of glassblowers. There’s just more bodies, and there’s more helpers, more things happening as team projects.”
Some of those volunteers lent a hand at Flo’s open house, getting buckets of water, handing Jewitt tools, and opening up the glory hole—a furnace for re-heating glassblowing projects-in-progress.
Flo office manager Luisa Lawson said the workshop’s two furnaces run almost year-round. She said in the summer the studio can heat up to 50 or 55 C.
Jewitt said she shuts the furnaces down for part of July and August because of how hot it gets.
“I start doing midnight shifts. I start doing anything I can just to stay out of the heat,” she said. “No one envies this work in June, but all throughout the winter it’s the ideal place to come and hang out.”
Jewitt, now 31, started blowing glass 13 years ago at Sheridan College in Toronto. After Sheridan, she said she started a business making small jewelry out of her garage and then, four years ago, co-founded Flo with Bronwen McKnight, another Ottawa glassblower who has since retired from the business.
She said Flo keeps growing and now hosts all-night “glass mayhem” installations at Ottawa’s Nuit Blanche and glassblowing Olympics competitions for some of the studio’s more experienced glassblowing enthusiasts.
“We’re feeling pretty crammed in here now. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a couple years we do feel the need to expand and find another spot,” Jewitt said. “It keeps on ballooning out.”
