As the Glass Bubble Project marks its 25th year on Bridge Avenue in Ohio City, FreshWater contributor Katie McMenamin stopped by for a visit with owner Mike Kaplan and ended up assisting Kaplan and other artists in the glassblowing process.

Walking into the Glass Bubble Project feels like journeying to a different time and place. The trip starts with a vibrant Piet Mondrian-inspired mural painted on its exterior cinderblock wall on Bridge Avenue and continues onto the cobblestone of West 24th Place.

Upon arrival at the studio, a bright glass sun beckons from above its eclectically decorated doors—inviting guests to enter into a different world, a world where Morty the Rooster will most likely greet you.

Inside is a large open space, its ceiling cluttered with a clash of colors in varying shapes of hanging glass light fixtures and chandeliers. In the center of the room is a workbench nestled between two metal trestles.

It is at that workbench where the artisans rest the metal pipes that they use to spin the glass bubbles.

Assorted bowls of brightly colored bits of crushed glass called “frit” used to decorate the blown glass while it’s still hotOpposite the bench is a heatproof table, holding assorted bowls of brightly colored bits of crushed glass in a variety of sizes called “frit.” The artists use the frit to decorate the blown glass while it’s still hot.

Further inside, on the back wall, lives the heart of the Glass Bubble Project: The main furnace, which remains lit at a blazing 2,000 degrees Celsius all year round.

Founded by Mike Kaplan in 1998, he and his friends transformed the former Diamond Welding space at 2421 Bridge Avenue into the eccentric factory workshop and teaching facility it is today.

The Glass Bubble Project teaches classes for kids as young as five, but also holds private classes for adults, date nights, corporate groups, and parties.

Over the years, Kaplan has surrounded himself with an ever-changing crew of artisans, some with more formal training than others, himself included.

Kaplan built all the furnaces and ovens himself, from the main furnace to a smaller reheating furnace the annealing boxes—which look like top-open ice cream freezers but are actually ovens that are slightly cooler than the furnace (900 degrees Celsius, versus 2000 degrees). “Annealing” describes the process of allowing glass pieces to cool slowly and thereby avoid cracking.

Glass Bubble ProjectAll Are Welcome

When the Glass Bubble Project’s doors open each day, anyone is welcome to stop in and watch the artisans work and create.

However, watching means you might end up helping.

Kaplan is a natural teacher and instinctively he’ll ask observers—recently, a kid from the neighborhood and this writer—to get involved by holding open and closing the doors to the furnace glory hole.

“I didn't graduate college, I started my own place,” says Kaplan. “One of the reasons I wanted to start my own place was I like to share things I have… I knew that I would just show people how to do this. So that became my living.”

In addition to teaching, Kaplan and the Glass Bubble Project members make custom glass shades, chandeliers, paperweights, pendants with loved one’s ashes inside, as well as any other colorful and beautiful bauble you can imagine.

Kaplan has created custom work for residential and commercial spaces—especially Dante Boccuzzi’s restaurants and the Ritz-Carlton Cleveland.

The Glass Bubble also has a metalworking shop on site, and Kaplan welds the metal he uses on his glass fixtures, as well as teaches metalworking classes.

At the Glass Bubble Project anyone is welcome to stop in and watch the artisans work and createThe History of Glass Blowing

Glass blowing was created around the first century CE in the Middle East. The first blowpipes were likely made out of clay and dung, and, according to Kaplan, and possibly bamboo.

“Somebody was sitting around, and they were sucking down a milkshake or something and [they decided to drink] their milkshake with a bamboo straw,” he speculates about the origins of the steel rods he uses to gather glass out of the furnace. “It's like we gotta gather glass out of the furnace somehow and blow a bubble with this thing.”

For nearly two millennia, glass blowing remained both an art and craft solely passed down from master to apprentice—with their recipes and processes jealously guarded.

In 1291, Venetian glassmakers were forced to move their furnaces to the island of Murano, ostensibly to protect the town from furnace fires, but most likely to prevent espionage, as glassmakers were forbidden from leaving the island (punishable by death!).

There were innovations over the centuries, but true industrialization took over the craft with the invention of mechanically pressed glass in 1820. The glass trade took off from there.

By the 1960s, the studio glass movement firmly moved glass blowing into the art that it is today, and that art is what you can see and participate in when you come to the Glass Bubble Project.

“They get a full experience with me,” Kaplan says of his students. “They have no preconceived notions of what to expect. And this [glassblowing]—this has their full attention. Oh yeah, they don't think about games or phones or anything.”

Kaplan and his colleague Paul Lewarchick create two lampshades over the course of the afternoonMaking the Glass

Watching Kaplan and his colleague Paul Lewarchick create two lampshades over the course of the afternoon is an eye-opening and intensively hot experience.

Kaplan and Lewarchick begin by taking a small premade chunk of glass that the Glass Bubble Project sources from the Czech Republic.

As in the Venetian glass-making heyday, the Czech chunk is too dangerous to make it in a crowded area like Ohio City—especially right behind the West Side Market—and it needs a much hotter furnace than what is on-site. Think lightning strikes on a beach.

They have my full attention.

The main ingredient is silica or silicon dioxide, which is basically clean sand tempered with ingredients like sodium or potassium bicarbonate, along with stabilizers like lime or chalk. Without those ingredients, the untreated glass can break down when it’s exposed to water or humidity for too long.

Lewarchick explains: “So what they do is they take the raw ingredients, the cake batter, and we're taking the cake and shoveling it into the furnace," he says. "They take all the toxic dusty fauna out of it and then we shovel the nuggets into the furnace.”

The next step is to take one of the hollow steel rods—the modern-day bamboo straw—and dip it into the crucible, a 19-inch diameter of ceramic fiberglass roughly shaped like a teacup, digging out a small molten piece of glass that attaches to the pole like honey.

Kaplan takes the pipe over to one of the trestles, where he blows air into the glass, growing it into a small bubble.

The bubble of glass, now the size of a large potato, glows bright orange, as Kaplan takes the current project over to a heatproof table.

Lewarchick asks him what colors he wants and then lays out a couple of chunks of the colored glass frit that Kaplan then rolls the potato.

The frit sticks to the hot glass and immediately melts into the bubble and then it warps and swirls as Kaplan twirls the stick.

Kaplan takes the glass bubble back to the trestle and as he rolls and blows, Lewarchick helps shape the piece with a variety of tools that stand nearby in waterfilled buckets and on a wood worktable—tools like molds, oversized tweezers called Jacks, various sized pincer-shaped shears, metal files, and flat paddles.

Very soon the potato blossoms into a fluted tulip.

Mike Kaplan founder of The Glass Bubble Project glass studioIt’s time to put the observers (me and the neighborhood kid) to work to open the doors of the reheating furnace—called the glory hole because its two doors have half-moons that meet in the center to create a circle, which allows Kaplan and his colleagues to reheat the glass when needed and get close enough to do it.

We open and close these doors with yard-long metal poles, as the furnace is exceedingly hot at 2,000 degrees Celsius. Kaplan puts the glass back into the heat and instructs us to close them again.

After a few moments he tells us to open the doors and he takes his artwork back to the trestle for more shaping.

I’m keenly aware that there’s a literal glass-shaped hot potato swinging close to my head as Kaplan continues the process of shaping and reheating the glass. Back and forth from the furnace to the trestle, shaping and twirling, until eventually, the tulip becomes a mushroom cap.

Kaplan and Lewarchick are satisfied with the final shape, and I feel like I’ve spent an hour in the desert noonday sun.

Even near the end of the process, the glass looks bright orange, but Kaplan coaxes us to get closer, and sure enough, I can see the smallest sheen of blue beneath the heat.

And so it goes at the Glass Bubble Project in Ohio City. For 25 years, they’ve been creating beautiful pieces of art and teaching others how to do it.

“You want to know what?” Kaplan says, “Twenty-five years later we’re still doing the same. Living the dream. Successfully custom. The only thing that’s changed is the people.”

The Glass Bubble Project is located at 2421 Bridge Avenue, Cleveland. The studio is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Mondays, and Wednesday through Sunday. The studio is closed on Tuesdays. For more information on classes, or to enroll email the Glass Bubble Project or call (216) 696-7043.